A man who writes about crises for a living will not trade them. He earns in dollars, saves in gold and land on a clock, and thinks a small hole in the diesel market is about to become too much fuel.
This is not a recommendation to buy or sell gold, diesel, land, a miner, or any other asset. It is an account of what Doomberg told a Vancouver Resource Investment Conference interviewer. His gold prices are his memory, not a settlement print. His barrel counts are a sketch he did out loud. Both can be wrong. You can lose money. Copy a rule only if you can keep it when it hurts.
Here is the only idea. The rule is the position. The story is the temptation. Doomberg, speaking on VRIC Media, said he does not try to trade the public markets, including the mining stories that fill a conference like the one he was sitting in. He earns in fiat. He saves in real assets. He invests privately, where a phone call can change the outcome. The saving rule is physical gold, bought every month, plus land. He broke it once, sold a slice when gold was near 5,200 dollars, watched the usual two regrets, and bought it back. The same temperament, pointed at diesel, says the spike will not last. A shortage in a small traded pool invites more supply and less use. Then you cannot give the fuel away. Clicks pay more for the crisis than for the glut. He says he would rather keep the readers who are still there when the crisis passes.
Earn, save, and do not narrate your book
The interviewer asked the question every guest gets. What are you buying. How are you positioned for a year that will not sit still.
Doomberg ducked it on purpose. He said he learned a long time ago that emotional decisions did not help his bottom line. So he built rules he can follow without a feeling. He earns in fiat. He saves in real assets. When he puts new money into a private company, or follows on, he uses a list. Position size is on the list. The “hunch and bunch” is not. That is his name for the moment you are sure, so you put on too much. He thinks it fails for him and for most of the people listening.
The one public position he was willing to describe is gold. A monthly buy of physical metal. A separate, capped allocation to paper gold inside a retirement account. If the price rises, the gold he already holds is worth more. If the price falls, the next month’s buy gets cheaper, and the average cost slips down. He said he is, he hopes, decades away from needing it. His test is crude. Wake up in twenty years. See what an ounce still buys. He wants rough parity with what it buys now. He called that a success for savings. He was careful about the word. Gold, for him, is not an investment. The investing bucket is elsewhere.
He also said why the investing bucket is not a brokerage screen. Doomberg writes Doomberg. A letter that holds the stocks it praises is open to a fair charge: you are talking your book. The other school says you should put money where your mouth is. He granted that school its logic. He picked the other one. No public stocks, so the page is not a position. He used to dabble. He stopped. Not because he thinks public prices are fake. Because a conflict would change the sentence.
That choice has a cost he named without drama. He does not worry, trade by trade, about a crisis, a collapse, a gold price that triples, or a gold price cut in half. He keeps buying and holding. The letter gets more work when the news is bad. He publishes more. He tries to get ahead of the week for subscribers. In a boom he wants enough exposure to a growing economy to hold his living, or grow it. The system is the point. If you do not have rules you can run without emotion, you will make emotional mistakes. He said that as a conclusion, not as a slogan.
Know which game you are bad at
He does not think this is a personality you are born with. He thinks it is a fit. He called himself a good networker with a long contact list, someone who has been generous with time and has had that generosity return. When a portfolio company is in trouble, the chief executive calls, and he has scars to draw on. Brand, channel, demand, technology, operations. How they weave into a business that can share value with the people who depend on it. He has built more than one. He thinks he is good at writing and at pattern recognition. He thinks he is a hard worker. He quoted Jim Harbaugh’s line about waking up with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind, and said he means it. He still reads Tony Robbins, corny as that sounds to him, and takes the piece that fits.
Trading is not on that list. He said if he were good at it, he would do it. He is not. He remembers graduate school, watching someone make millions in internet stocks during the dot-com boom, and thinking it looked like a good trick. It was not a trick that worked for him. The line he kept coming back to was plainer than a model. There is no trick. The trick is to be better. Work harder. Wake up, decide what moves the ball today, and move it, even if you feel sick, even if the book is behind. He had a piece due. He said he had been up at two in the morning writing it. The book could wait until the piece was done. The monthly presentation could wait its turn. Lament is not a draft.
He offered a stranger’s rule as the clean version of the same idea. A real-estate investor, a billionaire whose name he could not recall, was asked the secret. One rule, held for forty-five years: cities develop to the north. So he buys the cheapest rural land on the outer edge of growing American cities, and he holds it. When the cycle turns down, he is buying. When it turns up, he sells into strength. Doomberg borrowed a line from Tony Greer for that second half. If you do not feed the ducks when they are hungry, when do you sell. The answer, for people without a rule, is never. One plain idea. A long time. No extra machinery.
He does not think you should steal that man’s compass. He thinks you should notice how little of it there is. North. Cheap. Edge. Hold. Sell into strength. Five words, and a life. His own version is just as short. Monthly gold. Land. Private companies he can help. No public book. The philosophy is not a mood. He said trading is philosophy and investing is philosophy, then proved it by refusing to talk about the ten-year yield, the yen, or a gold revaluation as if those were positions. He tossed off a ten-year at 5.3 percent as the sort of number that fills a day. He did not offer it as a forecast. Treat it as his example of noise. Not as a print this page has checked.
Gold is the floor, not the plot
Asked what else sits with the gold, he gave the old list. Gold, land, and collectibles. He said the bitcoin world would like a seat on that podium, and he understands the ask. It is not his podium. He owns farmland, forest, and commercial property. He has “dabbled” in a Rolex. The primary mix is gold and land. Land, because they are not making more of it. Gold, because he likes the relationship between the stock already above ground and the new flow from mines. He thinks the pair puts a floor under net worth. He also said the floor is not a universal plan. He has been at it for years. What matters is that a saving rule exists and that it is kept.
He compared diets, which is a better analogy than it sounds. He said the popular fat diets all work when they share one ban: do not eat the processed food in the middle of the store. Vegan or caveman, the outer ring is the rule. The brand is optional. Saving is the same. The brand of hard asset matters less than the fact that money leaves the spending account on a date. His date is monthly. He named APMEX as the counter. Order. Be home for the signature, or go to the post office if the carrier misses. Then put it away. He joked about a box near a tree in some other country, then dropped the joke. There are real ways to store metal. The habit is the point, not the punch line. Do not take the tree as a method.
He did the arithmetic of time without a spreadsheet. Wake up eighty-five months later and you have a stack, if you did not skip. The stack only grows if more comes in than goes out. Two levers. Earn more, or spend less. He called himself a maker more than a saver. He still thinks the “millionaire next door” pattern is true, and that almost anyone can save. What they cannot skip is the cost. You give up a pleasure today for a security you may not feel tomorrow. People visit him, other writers and hosts, and they want the trick behind the letter. He walks them through tools, what worked, what may not work for them. They still want a trick. He tells them the work is the trick. Get up. Move the ball. Even a little.
For a reader who came to a mining conference to find a ticker, this is the wrong product and the right warning. He is not compounding a junior. He is compounding a habit. The metal does not care about the conference. The conference cares about the metal. Those are different businesses.
The time the rule broke, and why he closed it
He has not always been this dull, and he said so. At some point, when gold rose fast, he sold a small piece. He thinks the sale was around 5,200 dollars. The reason was size. The position had become a little large inside the retirement account. Then he watched it run toward 5,400, or whatever the top was. He did not give a certified high. He gave the feeling. You wonder if you left money on the table. Then it fell, in his telling, toward 3,900. Then you wonder if you should have sold more. Both feelings are the same trap. The first punishes you for having a rule. The second punishes you for not breaking it harder. He bought the slice back. The retirement contribution he is allowed, as a business owner, now goes to gold every year. Set it. Leave it.
He left one door open, and he labeled it as not the base case. If he woke up and the Treasury, under Scott Bessent, had revalued official gold to 20,000 dollars, he might sell some. He said he would not pretend otherwise. A fluke that locks in a generational gain is a sale. It is not why he owns the coins. The reason is a purchase he can picture. Twenty Gold Eagles buy a nicely appointed midsize sport utility vehicle today. He wants them to buy one in twenty years. That is a purchasing-power claim, not a price target. If the dollar price of gold is much higher and the vehicle costs the same in ounces, the rule held. If the ounces no longer cover the vehicle, the rule failed, whatever the headline price did.
The host pushed on the revaluation talk itself. He noted the chatter of recent years, and he raised Judy Shelton’s appointment to one of Bessent’s advisory boards as a reason people think a rewrite of the official gold price is more plausible now. Doomberg did not take the bait as a forecast. He took it as a media problem.
He said that if Doomberg wanted to be bigger, it would write about gold more often. Gold taps a specific fear. Achievers, people who have built something, look for a way to keep it. The name Doomberg is a nod to doom-scrolling, the hunt for the headline that says you might lose what you have. Gold is the hedge that fear reaches for. A great deal of content feeds the urge. Some of it is good. A lot of it is confirmation, click chasing, and the thumbnail game. He has been the guest whose thumbnail implied the opposite of what he said. He cannot control the art. He can refuse to write the piece that the art wants.
So he asked the host a blunt question. If Doomberg wrote a compelling case that Bessent was about to revalue gold, would the piece do well. The host said it would. Doomberg agreed. That is why they try not to write it unless they believe it. Revaluation is not why he owns the metal. He brought up the 20,000-dollar case only as an edge. If a formal devaluation of the dollar against gold actually happened, the hedge would have done its job, and he would be a seller into that strength. He hopes it does not happen. The rest of a life, the businesses, the land, the work, would lose more purchasing power than the gold sleeve would gain. Say it the other way, as he did. If it takes 50,000 dollars to buy one ounce, that sentence is about the dollar. It is not a love letter to gold.
He was also plain about weight. Gold is an important part of how he saves. It is a relatively small part of his net worth. He thinks that is about how much of the letter gold should occupy. Otherwise you become a gold paper, or a party paper. He said a shop that wanted money could run two letters, one feeding each political appetite. Both would work. He knows how to market them. He does not want that shop. Five hundred pieces in, he said he is still interested in the next one. The interest is the discipline. The topic is not allowed to become the whole page just because the topic converts.
The dangerous phase, and the bet he will not make
The host asked where we are in the long cycle, the fourth turning, the sort of season in which institutions fray. Doomberg’s first answer was almost a joke. How nice it would be to be the friends who have not noticed. Ignorance is bliss. Then he stopped joking.
He said he thinks we are near a very dangerous phase. He is bewildered that Europe talks about war with a nuclear-armed Russia as if survival were a detail. He called the approval of leaders in Germany, France, and Britain rock bottom. He called the European Union close to a blow-off in authoritarianism. He described Ursula von der Leyen as the functional match of an unelected dictator. He said ask Romanians if Europe is a democracy. He put Friedrich Merz’s approval at 12 percent and said Merz speaks as if Germany is already at war with Russia, a road Germany has taken twice before. He mocked Emmanuel Macron for watching missile tests while France, in his view, burns. He said talk of ending civilizations in the Middle East tells him the season is late, and that he hopes it is late enough to be near a rebirth rather than a middle.
These are his judgments. They are not findings this page has re-tried. A 12 percent approval figure is his figure. A comparison worse than the Cuban missile crisis is his comparison. He said we are far closer to a nuclear exchange than we were then. He would rather be called alarmist than silent. He also said most people will not see the smaller steps. He cited a Dutch defense minister labeling Russia the enemy, and a sharp statement from the Russian embassy demanding an explanation, with the hint that silence would be read as confirmation. He said that sort of exchange does not make the broadcasts. You find it on the side channels you have learned to trust. Then there is the football game. He does not think the game cancels the cable.
Asked whether authoritarianism belongs to the left or the right, he threw out the frame. He thinks the left-right split is mostly artificial. He guessed that 85 percent of people would sit in a broad middle if a credible candidate ever offered it. Such candidates, he said, are not offered, because a divided public is a busy public. He called the two big American news channels the same product, low signal, useful mainly as a guide to what a single political class wants you to stare at. A true consensus candidate would win in a landslide, he said, and then, over time, would be corrupted too. Absolute power. He has a domestic version of the same rule. One-party states in America become corrupt. He named California as a Democratic example and said Texas, long a Republican hold, is on the way, with a checkered record already. He does not have a replacement system to sell. He hopes this crisis passes without a nuclear exchange, and that “seen our heads” prevail. The phrase was his. The hope was, too.
Then he did the thing that makes the politics useful to an investor, instead of merely loud. He will not build a portfolio on being right about the war. He reached for Pascal’s wager and bent it. Do not bet against the grim ending in a way that ruins you if you are wrong. Or, in the market version he borrowed from the spirit of Jim Cramer’s old line: if you buy a dip that was a nuclear rumor and you are wrong, you are not here to collect. If you are right, you made money. He would rather assume it will be survived. That is not a research note on Russia. It is a refusal to let the worst case become the only position. The gold is already the hedge against a currency that fails. A letter that becomes a war letter would be the same error as a letter that becomes a gold letter. It would feed the click. It would shrink the mind.
The diesel sketch, which is the same rule in barrels
The last question was energy. The host had been reading a Doomberg piece on diesel. The cash register, he said, is ringing. Some companies are making a lot of money. Is this a crisis, or a faucet that stays open.
Doomberg said we are close to an “icorous” print. The word in the transcript is muddy. The meaning is not. The profit is extreme. If you do not sell into that strength, when will you sell. He has seen many cycles. They turn. They never feel like they will turn when you are drawing a straight line off the top of a curve. He called that the fallacy of a tangent to a sine wave. The line goes up. The wave is about to bend. Absent a full nuclear exchange, he said, you will not be able to give diesel away in two years. If you are long, there is a point, soon in his view, to take some profit. If you are the sort who shorts, he thinks diesel is setting up as a short, though it can still have a blow-off top first. He offered to show the work. The host asked him to.
The sketch, in his round numbers, goes like this. The world uses about 100 million barrels of oil a day. Before the shocks he has in mind, about 28 million of those barrels were refined into diesel, heating oil, and other middle distillates. Definition matters, and he flagged it. Of those 28 million, about 21 million were used in the countries that made them. Home first. That leaves about 7 million barrels a day as the jump ball. Those are the barrels that trade across water and set the price for everyone who relies on the global market. He called that pool the seaborne diesel market.
Russia, before the strikes, was about 800,000 barrels a day of that 7 million. He called it 11 percent of the jump ball. That, he said, is why diesel is high. If you want to wave the problem away, you say Russian diesel was less than 1 percent of all the oil in the world. True, and, in his view, beside the point. The price is set on the margin, in the pool that actually clears. Eight hundred thousand divided by 7 million is the bogey. Not eight hundred thousand divided by 100 million.
He then put the United States in the same pool. It had been about 1.3 million of the 7 million, and it lifted exports toward 1.9 million, offsetting most of the Russian hole. Not all of the hole. Barrels from the Middle East were also lost, and India has been trying to cover some of them without a perfect offset. A small miss in a 7-million-barrel market is a large price. That is the shortage.
The glut is the response, and he thinks it is already being built. Refineries can add flexibility. Chemistry can shift yields. He asked the listener to imagine the global system moving from 28 million barrels a day of distillate to 30 million. If nothing else changed, the jump ball would rise from 7 million to 9 million, against a demand that had only needed 7. At the same time, the efforts to use less diesel start to show up. Imagine demand for the traded pool falling from 7 million toward 6, while supply of that pool sits at 9. The shortage and the glut are the same market, a couple of years apart. He said every shortage leads to a glut. He said diesel crack spreads at 110 cannot stay there long. After the walk-through, he asked whether the two-year call still sounded bold. The host said it did not.
He added one more ratio, so the size would stick. One extra million barrels a day is not 1 percent of the oil world in any sense that matters here. It is one divided by seven. About 14 percent of the competitive pool. Losing Russia’s diesel was a shock of that order. Gaining a million barrels back, from new refining yield, is the same shock in reverse. The extra fuel will not have a home. Price will have to find one by collapsing.
Hold the sketch as a sketch. He said “about,” “prior to all this,” and “just imagine.” A later statistical release can move the 28, the 21, and the 7. The structure does not need the last barrel to be true. A price set by a small traded surplus will overreact to a loss inside that surplus. High prices pay for investment and for thrift. Both arrive late. Both arrive together. That is the sine wave. The tangent is the essay that says this time the line only goes up.
He then turned the math into a business choice, which is where it meets the gold rule. If Doomberg wrote that diesel stays short and the crack spread goes to 300, would that win more subscribers than a piece saying the crisis will pass, and here is why. He thinks the scare would win the week. He also thinks those subscribers would leave when the scare failed. A durable letter, in his view, says the thing it believes, with the homework showing, even when the honest ending is dull. Gold, diesel, or a war. Same test. The click is not the position. The position is the thing you can still defend when the thumbnail is wrong.
What a mining reader can actually take
You are not Doomberg. You may need public stocks. You may not have private companies calling you. You may not have a letter whose independence depends on owning nothing it writes about. The transferable part is smaller than his life, and more useful than his confidence.
First, separate savings from bets. He will not let gold become a trade, because the job of the gold is to buy the same vehicle in twenty years. A miner is not that job. A miner is a business, a cost, a permit, and a metal price, all at once. If you own one, you own a bet. Call it a bet. Do not call it savings because the rock is hard.
Second, write the rule before the price moves. His monthly order does not ask what the conference thinks. His decision to buy back the slice he sold was a decision to stop negotiating with two kinds of regret. If your rule is “I will trim gold miners when the metal has doubled and the shares have tripled,” write the numbers now. If your rule is “I never sell,” then the diesel lesson is not yours, and you should not pretend you will be the one who feeds the ducks later. People who have no sell rule do not discover one at the top. They discover a story about why this top is different.
Third, find the jump ball in any commodity you touch. Diesel’s lesson is not only about diesel. Copper, silver, uranium, and oil products all have a total stock that sounds huge and a traded margin that is small. A disruption inside the margin moves the price as if the whole stock had vanished. The cure is investment and substitution. Both are slow, then sudden. A mining equity priced for the shortage, held through the cure, is how a true scarcity becomes a personal loss. He did not say to short miners. He said a shortage is a temporary description of a market that is already reacting.
Fourth, do not outsource your fear to a thumbnail. He thinks gold content converts because it flatters a real anxiety. Some of that anxiety is earned. The dollar can be debased. Wars can jump the rails. A rule of monthly metal is a response to that. A portfolio rebuilt every weekend around the latest guest is not. He has watched the thumbnail reverse his meaning. Assume the next one can reverse a miner’s drill result just as easily.
Fifth, know the game you are bad at. He is bad at trading and good at building. If you are bad at holding through a 30 percent drawdown, a junior that can fall 70 percent is not a character test you should volunteer for. If you are bad at selling, a diesel producer at a record crack is not a “forever compounder” just because the cash register is loud. The north-of-the-city rule works for a man who can hold land for decades. It is a trap for a man who will need the money in March.
What would make this reading wrong
The reading is wrong if his gold memory is the investment case. A sale “around 5,200,” a top “whatever it was,” and a drop “like 3,900” are courtroom words. They are not a price series. Use them as evidence of how regret feels. Do not use them as levels.
The reading is wrong if twenty Gold Eagles stop buying the vehicle and he still calls the rule a success. Purchasing power is the test he set. A higher dollar price that does not buy the same goods is a failure of the dollar and, if the ounces shrink in real terms, a failure of the hedge. He already said a 50,000-dollar ounce would be a statement about the dollar. He did not say it would make holders whole in life.
The reading is wrong if the diesel jump ball is not 7 million barrels, or if lost Russian and Middle Eastern barrels are replaced before refiners add the yield he fears. Then the glut is later, or smaller, and “you will not be able to give it away in two years” was a teacher’s ending, not a calendar. He allowed a blow-off top first. A long wait is not the same as a wrong structure. A structural change that keeps the traded pool tight would be a wrong structure. Nuclear war, which he set aside as the case in which the price does not matter, is the other way the call dies. He would rather not be right that way.
The reading is wrong if you hear a mining conference and conclude that public mining shares are a mistake for everyone. He avoids them so his writing stays unconflicted, and because he does not think he is a trader. A person who underwrites geology, keeps position sizes small, and sells into strength is playing a game he declined. That person is not refuted by his absence. They are warned by his reason. Most listeners, he said, are hurt by hunch and bunch. If that is you, his absence is the advice.
The idea, once
Doomberg came to a resource conference and declined the trade. He earns in dollars. He saves in gold, every month, and in land. He invests where he can pick up the phone. He sold a little gold near a high, felt both regrets, and put the rule back together. Twenty Eagles should still buy the vehicle in twenty years. A formal revaluation, if it ever came, would be a reason to sell, not a reason he bought. The letter does not become a gold letter just because a gold letter would be larger.
The diesel call is the same muscle. A small traded pool made an 800,000-barrel hole look like a new era. Refiners and users are already answering. Shortages, in his experience, give birth to gluts. The piece that says the crack spread goes to 300 would get more clicks. The piece that shows the 7 million and the 28 million will still be readable when the fuel is cheap. The rule is the position. The story is the temptation. He is trying, in public, to keep them apart.