Rick Rule has been putting on a conference for 31 years. This summer in Boca Raton was the first time he said he was satisfied. That is not a blurb. It is a man who grades other people’s resource portfolios for free and has been told the stack is near 100,000 lists. The sin he keeps finding is the same one Powers heard at lunch: too many companies, no idea why they are owned, no idea what would force a sale.
The interview that followed is a field manual for Canadian junior readers, not a shopping list. Rule will rank oil, gas and mining names 1 to 10 if you send them to Rule Investment Media. He will not rank your pot stock. He will not build a probabilistic net present value for a nodule collector whose start date and cost curve are still a story. He sold silver when the chart went parabolic and the comments turned from hate to love. He skipped a Ross Beaty IPO because the institutions were already loud. He still likes prospect generators unless the geology kicks his door in.
None of that is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Speculative mining equity can go to zero. A hundred-name book can do it faster.
Boca Was Not a Free Room
More than a thousand people paid to sit in the room. Another 2,300 streamed from 39 countries. Rule put the paid total above 3,000. About three-quarters of the live crowd, he said, were already students of the Rule Classroom — 26,000 people on 400-plus hours of taped material, given away. Exhibitors and speakers were interviewed and posted to YouTube before the doors opened so attendees could ration their time. Then the attendees organized themselves into what Rule called posses: geology plus finance plus market people asking the same exhibitor the same question three times to see if the answers tracked.
That is the opposite of a booth crawl. It is also why he liked the bar tab. Afterward, more than 300 people bought the recordings. Fifty hours in four days does not go in on the first pass. Independent mining media — Powers, the Kitcos — he treated as megaphones, not competitors, and guessed the clip stack ran to a few million views.
Next year he wants “next legends”: operators in their 40s and 50s who already have a win, because you cannot underwrite a 20-year runway in a 75-year-old. Living Legends — the Friedlands, the Lundins, the serial builders — stay useful as teachers. They are past their sell-by date as compounding vehicles. He also wants bigger-picture people “from the belly of the beast” in government, not as a substitute for interrogating companies, which is where he says the money is made, but as a map of the world as it is rather than as a network tells you it should be.
Canadian issuers who still treat a conference as a place to hand out hats should reread the posse paragraph.
The Hundred-Stock Portfolio
Powers sat with a woman who had a full-time job and a hundred names. Others admitted to 70. Rule’s classroom cover has always been: invest in yourself first; limit the book to the hours per month you will actually study the names. A hundred names and a day job is not a portfolio. It is a filing cabinet.
The grading desk keeps handing him the same interview. A man with almost a hundred tickers. First name on the list, an “A.” What do you know about it? Nothing. Why do you own it? Bob Bishop recommended it. Bishop had been retired 16 years. Why not sell? Bought at $4, now 40 cents; selling would “lose” $3.60. Rule’s line: you already lost $3.60. The question is what you do with the 40. If you like it, buy more. Can’t — it’s down. Then sell. Can’t — it’s down.
Price without an opinion of value is a hobby. Money, Rule said, is made on the delta between value and price. Price is a nanosecond away. Value is work. “Most speculators sadly would rather feel than think.”
If you cannot construct why you own a TSXV name — deposit, people, share count, what a bad assay does to the thesis — you are the woman at lunch. The market will not grade you for free. Rule will, if the list is rocks and hydrocarbons.
Hate, Hockey Sticks, and Fake Accounts
Sentiment, for him, is less a spreadsheet than a scar. January’s silver chart went parabolic. Canadians call it a hockey stick. The back side is as steep as the front and less fun. A parabolic with no new reason is a sale. He had bought silver when it was hated — comment threads on old interviews calling him a buggy-whip salesman, squeeze mythology, the usual conspiracies. Hate, to him, was a cheapness tell. Love replaced hate. He sold.
He does the same with companies. The business is “rife with promotion, much of it fraudulent.” He keeps identities that are not his name. When unsolicited mail arrives on Consolidated Orangutan with the usual adjectives, he has sold things he did not even own. “If I know it’s a sale, I don’t let the fact that I don’t own it constrain me.”
Newsletter writers still move retail psyche. They move institutions less. The junior tape is more institutional and more ETF-passive than it was when Doug Casey and Agora were tollgates. That is healthier. Power is diluted across 10,000 points of information. The consumer has to work. So does the pundit.
The Rule Classroom and the coming paid letter are the MIT move in miniature: give away technique, sell branded conclusions to people who would rather fish. A hundred thousand double-opt-in names at Rule Investment Media and 26,000 in the classroom are the funnel. He resisted a paid letter for 50 years. Demand surprised him. That is a commercial. It is also a tell about where retail still pays for someone else to do the ranking.
Arrogance Has a Rank Order
Powers wanted to know whether the next wave of arrogance would come from career mining CEOs or from small-cap promoters rotating through the sector. Rule made it biographical. In the 1970s gold went $35 to $850, deregulated deep gas 15 cents to $15, oil $3 to $30. He thought he was smart. He had confused a bull market with brains.
The least experienced participant will be the most arrogant relative to what they know. Promoters will be arrogant. Executives will be arrogant. Pundits will be arrogant. The new punter wins the contest. Some junior CEOs learned 2011. Rule shook his head at the idea that the class learned it as a group. Friedland’s arrogance, he said, is sometimes a sales tool and sometimes confidence; you have to ask him specifically about mistakes. Galactic went 10 cents to $20 to zero. Quartz Mountain went to zero. Failure is tuition if you write the post-mortem. Moral failure is a different invoice.
Powers had hung up on a $10 million company whose representative advertised 1990s email-scrape promotion and then called it a privilege to be allowed to buy the stock. Rule would have stayed. He wants the technique, including from people he would never back. “Pitch Rick” is the productized version: half an hour, $5,000, recorded in full for the classroom, ten minutes of deck, then questions that are neither friendly nor hostile. A good pitch reaches a list cheap. A bad one may end the financing career. He will add the name to the 800-company ranking book if they ask. One is best. Ten is worst. He expects the lame, the halt and the blind to land between seven and ten.
When he has been taken, he has chased restitution two or three times. Preference is to move on and circulate a private post-mortem to people who write large cheques. Reputation is a filter. He dropped a successful promoter decades ago when mentors — he named Ned Goodman and Seymour Schulich — asked him to, after the man’s conduct toward them. He would rather keep the mentors.
Beaty, Mergers, and Who Loses the Job
Ross Beaty has been on one geological idea for something like 20 years. Rule has been a serial investor. He did not need the latest IPO ticket and did not take it. Institutional enthusiasm looked too high. If they solve a tax problem in Poland, he said, the stock is cheap — if, not when. If the problem drags, he may add below the IPO print. Time value of money on the earlier cheques is a separate regret. Persistence is not a price target.
Why intelligent junior mergers do not happen: greed first, ego more often than he used to admit. Somebody loses a job. Dual incumbents both think they should run the combined company. Rule pays a premium not to be in control. He assumes others think like that. He now suspects they do not.
G Mining and G2 Goldfields, in his telling, worked because both sides knew the asset was going to one home. Advancing permits and confidence would raise the price the buyer could pay. The seller tried to get big enough to create tension and keep a sidecar. The buyer paid a full price for a deposit it had to have and did not try to steal it — helped, he laughed, by overlapping shareholders. Powers raised Rupert and “Orion”; Agnico eventually bought the Finland package. Rule’s general rule still fits that file: delay is often management on the side that would be deleted.
Canadian boards that think a friendly merger is a moral victory should ask who keeps the parking spot.
When a Prospect Generator Should Drill Its Own Best Hole
Rule will back a 100% shot if the geologist kicks his ass with data he cannot refute. He will often fund a couple of holes to put a third dimension on a farm-out and improve terms. A generator that says it always keeps the best for itself is telling the major it is selling detritus.
David Lowell at Arequipa is the parable. Thirty porphyry targets drilled on other people’s money; any one of them could have busted the company. A small gold scab Lowell thought might be half a million ounces. Three holes for $200,000. The 250,000-ounce idea became an 8 million-ounce deposit. Eleven holes later a $30 million company sold to Barrick for a billion dollars in 19 months. Francisco Gold worked two prospects toward farm-outs; geophysics and surface work said drilling could not fail, only size the thing; both worked; Glamis bought the company and the acquirer stock doubled on the growth the market said it lacked. Rare, Rule said. Not never.
That is the prospect-generator arithmetic Canadian readers have heard from him before. The new sentence is the same as Boca’s posse: more information before more dilution.
Deep-Sea Mining: Narrative Until There Is Arithmetic
Powers had taken a meeting with a deep-sea name whose valuation case was “look at TMC.” Rule does not invest in technology or process when he cannot build a probabilistic NPV. Political risk he will take. An unknown boss, unknown opex, unknown start date he will not. Nodule grades can impress. “Open cut with extraordinary pumping costs” is not a model. He sees five-year value in names like Rio, Glencore and BHP that he understands. If he is wrong, the seabed is a superb speculation for someone else. He is not opportunity-constrained enough to need it.
That sentence should hang in every Canadian board pack that leads with a peer multiple and no cash-flow bridge.
What He Is Selling Besides the Sermon
Free rankings: mining and oil and gas only. Battle Bank: he will argue bullion is collateral and that idle checking deposits should earn something. Those are his commercials. They do not change the ranking rule. They do not make a hundred-name book a strategy.
Conclusion
Rule left Boca happy and left Powers with the same hierarchy he has taught for decades. Study before you buy. Own what you can value. Sell hockey sticks that have no new reason. Do not confuse a bull market with intelligence. Mergers fail because someone would lose a chair. Generators should farm out until the rock forbids it. Deep-sea mining is a story until it is a spreadsheet.
Canadian juniors will spend the next year raising into a tape that still pays aggression. The woman with a hundred stocks will be offered the hundred-and-first. The work is the same. Price is easy. Value is not. If you cannot say why you own the name, you already know what Rule would write in the margin.
Important information
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It is based on a Mining Stock Education conversation between Bill Powers and Rick Rule and on public industry history referenced in that conversation. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security, commodity, bank product, newsletter, or conference recording. Mr. Rule and associated businesses offer rankings, education, events, and banking products; those are his commercial activities, not endorsements by this publication. Comments on companies, including issuers tied to Ross Beaty, G Mining, G2 Goldfields, Agnico, prospect generators, and deep-sea miners, are discussion of an interview, not recommendations. Speculative mining investments can result in loss of principal. Consult a licensed adviser. The author and publisher accept no liability for actions taken on the basis of this article. Past performance is not indicative of future results.