On Sunday, September 28, 2026, Rick Rule sat down with Phil Carroll and Kevin Hornsby on The Sunday Roast and refused the trade the room wanted. Gold was around $4,300, down from above $5,000 when he had warned in March that a rearing move could go sideways or down. The hosts had a war in the Strait of Hormuz, a copper deficit, a silver price that had already doubled in a year, and a list of small stocks that had just jumped. Rule’s answer was narrower than the news. A weaker dollar does not put in a purchase order for every rock. Gold is the bet with the highest probability and the thinnest ownership. Copper, oil, and silver have their own customers, their own costs, and their own way of making the shareholder pay before the price does.
This piece has one idea. The loss of purchasing power is not a buy signal for every commodity. Put gold in the probability box. Put the rest in the possibility box, and size that box so a total loss does not change what you eat for breakfast. If you spend the second box as if it were the first, you do not have a thesis. You have a mood.
Rule is the founder of Rule Investment Media. He was not giving a tip, and this article is not one either. He would not name the small company he said he was buying. The hosts, after he left, talked about other shares they follow. Those names are not his idea, and they are not repeated here as if he blessed them. Nothing below is a recommendation to buy or sell gold, silver, copper, oil, a royalty company, or a mine.
The dollar can rot without the metals marching
The hosts pushed him toward a 1970s replay and then did the arithmetic for him. If the dollar loses about three-quarters of its purchasing power, as he said it did from 1970 to 1980, a basket that cost $1,000 at the start of that decade cost $4,000 at the end. Match that decay and gold, they said, is $16,000 to $18,000. Silver is $30-plus. Copper is $60,000 a ton. He would not sign the last two.
He does think a rude decade is in front of savers. His American arithmetic, which he offered as illustration and not as a world model, was an on-balance-sheet pile he put near $40 trillion and an unfunded-entitlement promise he put near $120 trillion in today’s value. He said the first grows by about $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion a year and the second by about $2.5 trillion. Together that is roughly the size of gross federal income, in his telling. Two exits. Tell the bondholder and the retiree the truth, the way a default does, and he does not think that is the American habit. Or kick the can, lean on rates where you can, and run quantitative easing, which he called counterfeiting done by the people who would jail you for the same act. His premise is a rerun of the 1970s. Yields on cash and bonds do not pay you for the decay in the paper. Long bonds, the asset that worked for forty years, get the awakening.
Gold, in that rerun, is the instrument that can mirror the decay. He does not expect a repeat of the 26-fold rise he remembers from that decade, when the gold price and interest rates rose together. He would not be surprised by a three- or fourfold rise in the dollar price of gold if the dollar’s buying power falls by about three-quarters. That is a large sentence. It is still a gold sentence. He said he is not sure you would see the same escalation in every commodity, and he is not pretending he knows.
The reason is use. Copper is supposed to be made into something that earns its cost. A higher copper price can make fabricators use less, or use it better. Oil taught him the lesson when he was young. It went from about $2 to about $30. Washington and the Club of Rome talked as if the price would go to infinity. Markets worked. People found more. People used less. If your portfolio plan is that industrial commodities will copy the 1970s because the currency is sick, he said you should not count on it. He is not saying it cannot happen. He is saying a portfolio is not a place for a hope you have not stress-tested against the other side of the market.
Cost does not have to become price
Hormuz is the live example, and he would not turn it into a structural thesis on a podcast clock. Six months after he last told them he could not know the outcome, the disruption is still there. An armistice that held, he said, would drop the oil price hard, because high prices have already killed some demand. In Britain, Canada, or the United States, you curse at the pump and drive away. A cab driver in a poorer city parks the cab. Reintroduce supply into a market that has learned to use less and you hit a vacuum. He offered that as a mechanism, not a forecast. He also does not see a clean end to a fight that both Israeli and Iranian leaderships treat as existential. He is not a geopolitical analyst, and he said so.
The copper version of the same mechanism is sulfuric acid. A lot of copper production needs acid. Acid has moved through the Strait. The hosts said the Strait is not delivering it. Rule’s picture of the workaround was a sulfur pile in Vancouver. Strip sulfur from natural gas and you make acid the way the Gulf does. Those piles, he said, went from about $75 a ton to about $700. Pleasant for the people who already make sulfur. Smelters that used to treat acid as a small line on the revenue page are no longer bored by it. India has said it will protect Indian-flagged ships in the Strait whether the cargo loads in Iran or Qatar. Neutral in the war, not neutral about Indian supply. He would not be surprised if China said the same: fight each other if you must, but do not touch our ships. He does not think either side is likely to sink a Chinese or Indian hull, though he added that the stupidity of leaderships can surprise him. Workarounds can show up without an armistice. Markets, again, will work. Messy.
Here is the line investors skip. A higher cost to make copper does not force a higher copper price. He has watched the industry lose vast amounts of money when the cost to produce sat above the price to sell. Mines are capital traps. Once the money is sunk, they produce down to cash cost, and sometimes below it. The gap does not have to close through the price. It can close through the shareholder. “The copper price has to rise because acid is expensive” is a slogan. History, he said, teaches something colder. The delta comes out of the owners.
That is why a supply deficit is not a price guarantee either. He sees no doubt that, at today’s consumption, the copper deficit gets worse. The exploration boom that would feed today had to start twenty years ago. It did not. Discoveries are scarce. Then he granted the host’s fear. A shortage of supply can meet a shortage of demand. If a long energy shock tips the world into a real slowdown, copper is economically sensitive, and the crossing point of the two curves can fall. He has already been wrong once in public with these same hosts. He expected lower copper prices in 2026. The economy was stronger than he thought. He called it surprisingly able to take a punch: war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East, higher energy, and what he called idiotic debts. He is nervous about how many punches are left. Nervous is not a copper target.
Gold is the probability because it is underowned
Asked what he would hate to have ignored by September 2029, he said he does not know which commodity wins. He does know what most portfolios are missing. Almost the entire planet, in his view, is underweight gold. Across the list of things you might own, gold has the highest probability of success. Not the greatest possible success. The highest probability. And it is underowned at the same time. That pairing is the whole recommendation he was willing to make for other people’s money.
He split the way to own it. A tier-one book, he said, should do well: Franco-Nevada, Wheaton, Agnico. Do more work and you can look for takeover targets, because he thinks a “goofy” round of mergers is coming. Do still more work and the ragged edge, the explorers and developers, can pay you. The condition is the work. Gold the metal is the probability. A company that is looking for gold is not gold. If the price of a thing you do not have goes up, your value does not have to rise. He has ranked what he says is nearly 100,000 resource portfolios over thirty-five years, for free, and the failure he keeps seeing is a laundry list of fifty or sixty narrative stocks and two hours a month. His minimum for a speculator is an hour a month per company, spent on financial statements, insider filings, and resource reports. A podcast does not count as that hour, including, he implied, the one he was on.
Near-term, he would not be surprised if gold trades sideways to down while American interest rates stay firm. A higher U.S. rate makes the dollar look better than other paper and pulls capital in. Assets priced in dollars, gold included, tend to weaken when the dollar strengthens. A deposit that yields something is a livelier rival to gold than a deposit that yielded almost nothing four years ago. Five percent, he said, does not cover inflation. It still beats fifty basis points as a place to park savings. Younger listeners think gold and rates cannot rise together. He told them to read the 1970s, when he says gold rose 26-fold and the interest rate quadrupled. If the yield is rising because savers demand pay for lost purchasing power, the two can rise together, with a lag. If, in the meantime, the market and not the Federal Reserve owns the long end of the curve, you get a stronger dollar and a softer gold price first. The decade and the month are different trades. Mixing them is how people sell the probability because the month was rude.
Silver was a hate trade, and the hate ended
Silver is the case study in not promoting a possibility into a probability after the crowd arrives. A year ago, the hosts said, silver near $30 would have made $60 to $70 look like a gift. Rule had been quoted, and hated, for selling at least 80 percent of his physical silver in January. He did it because the silver in his speculative box had been a bet on hate. Five or six years ago silver was a word people were bored by or despised. For a speculator, hate is the setup. By October, November, December, and January, silver was no longer hated. The parabolic move looked to him like a rocket, and rockets lose momentum. For once, he said, he was right. Silver now trades substantially below that high. The basket of silver stocks he kept has risen, even if less than in 2025.
The switch was arithmetic, not a new religion. He put about half the silver proceeds into silver stocks that, in his reading, were priced as if silver were $45 in a world where the metal had printed $80. If silver rose, the stocks should work. If it went sideways, the metal would pay him nothing, but the stocks could still work off a $45 assumption. If it fell, the stocks had more room, in his judgment, than the metal. That is a speculation with a stated reason. It is not “silver always leads.” His history of bull markets is the opposite order. Gold leads, bought by fear. Silver leads later, bought by greed, when the gold move is strong enough that generalists enter and the narrative feels confirmed. He thinks the nominal gold bull market resumes. He does not know if that is 2027 or 2028. He has watched leadership pass from gold to silver four times in his career. He cannot date the fifth.
He was equally cold on the other hated-sounding metals the hosts offered. Lithium and nickel are not hated enough. Not close. Lithium producers, he said, are still profitable at the current price. Hate, for him, is a price below the full cost of production, including the cost of capital. He does not know a commodity on earth in that state. Stocks can be hated while the product is not. Capital is still showing up for lithium. And if direct extraction from oilfield brines works, the path Exxon, Chevron, Occidental, and Warren Buffett have been associated with, then the oversupply of hope gets worse, not better. He is not a technology analyst. He is saying the contrarian shelf is bare. Countries are a different shelf. Iran, Russia, Ivory Coast, Guinea, South Sudan, Congo, Bolivia. Places so disliked that a decent deposit has less competition. Russia, he said, was very good to him for twenty-four years and very bad in one. The rule for trying this at home is money you can lose entirely. The breakfast test. A stake that cannot change the meal, aimed at ten, twenty, or thirty times if you are right. Over forty-five years that habit has been good to him. It has also cost him all of the capital in a trade, more than once.
Three boxes, and a five-year clock
He allocates his own money in three boxes, and the distinction is the idea in operational form. Savings are insurance. Cash, gold, and, for him, most of the savings actually denominated in gold, plus short-term dollar paper. Investment is capital aimed at the probability of an acceptable return. Speculation is capital aimed at a possibility, which he defined as a chance below one half, of a return high enough to pay for that chance. His speculative box is large because he has done it for a long time. He does not think that is the right box for most listeners of a show like this, even the ones who feel the greed. They would do better, he said, with more money on probabilistic outcomes and less on possible ones, unless they will work very hard.
The probability book he named was dull on purpose. Franco-Nevada, Wheaton, Agnico Eagle, and the big diversified producers and an oil major in the same breath: BHP, Rio Tinto, Exxon. Let it swing. Let it compound. Take what he called the beta, the resource and precious-metals sector doing better than other sectors over the next ten years, and spend the hours you did not waste on fifty stories with your family. He once stopped speculating for a very rich family because they could afford the loss and could not stand it. Wealth, he told them, is a sense of well-being. A portfolio that requires a psychiatrist is a failed portfolio even if the arithmetic survives.
The hosts asked what he would buy for a twelve- to twenty-four-month gamble. He said nothing. He is not a twelve-month buyer. He is a five-year buyer. Pressed for the five-year name, he still would not give it. He said he was buying it, and he did not want ten thousand listeners competing with him. The category, not the title: micro-caps, under about $200 million Canadian, offshore oil and gas exploration, conventional, in frontier and emerging places institutional investors cannot spell. Namibia. Gabon. Often London-listed. He likes that AIM has a bad reputation. The energy money of the last ten years went to shale basins, not to this. For other people’s money he had already said gold. The oil micro-caps are his speculation, not the assignment he handed the audience.
Time is where he thinks speculators lie to themselves. You can have the copper thesis right and the deposit right, and still need five years to answer the questions in the ground. If your horizon is six weeks, the gap between the time required and the time you allowed almost guarantees no profit. The market does not care that you hate holding a stock over a long weekend. Volatility is the tuition. If you do not know what the holding is worth, a down day scares you into selling. If you do know, the same day is more likely a place to buy. He believes he has lost money on more speculative trades than he has made it. The arithmetic that saves the craft is a fifteen- or twenty-bagger that pays for a pile of losses of a quarter of the stake. Without the winners of that size, the losses are just losses. Without the stomach, you will not be there for the winner.
Government money is not a shortcut
The critical-minerals panic got the same treatment. The hosts said China is weaponizing gallium, germanium, tungsten, antimony, and the rest, and Washington is throwing money at projects. Rule, an American, said China is mostly right in the trade. The United States weaponized the dollar before China weaponized a minor metal. The processing technology, he said, was Canadian and American, sent to China around 1990. If Washington wanted to compete, it could copy the tax code. A tilt-up concrete building in the United States, in his example, is depreciated over thirty years, about 3 percent a year. The same building in China is expensed in year one. After tax, the return on capital is simply higher there. Beijing, he said, rebuilt something like the American code of the 1950s, an investment code rather than a consumption code, and Americans resent it. He went further than the tax line. A thin environmental code with prison if you break it, which he also credits to Chile, beats a decade of negotiating with the EPA and, perhaps, a campaign contribution. Business people, he said, have more freedom in communist China than in the United States. He expected that sentence to shock. It was the point.
His preference is that the government get out of the way rather than subsidize mines and processing plants. Issuers love dumb money, and he has never seen money dumber than government money. He cited about $400 million into Mountain Pass, a rare-earth site that has been bankrupt three times in his career. On copper he compared a Chinese build with an American wait. Zijin, by his memory, went from a preliminary application to construction of a copper mine in Tibet on a clock he put at twenty-six years. Resolution, in the United States, is the better rock in his telling: 1.2 billion tons at 1.5 percent copper, about three times the grade of that Chinese deposit, on a paved road, with gas, power, water, and a town of copper miners between two existing mines. It has been in permitting twenty-eight years. The two clocks, as he stated them, are close. The sermon is not a stopwatch. One system, in his view, has arranged taxes and permits so capital gets spent. The other negotiates. Pouring public money into the second system does not fix the code. It feeds the issuers.
What to do with the idea
Write the two boxes on a page before you buy anything this story made you want. In the probability box, gold, owned in a form you understand, sized so a sideways year, which he said would not surprise him, does not force a sale. Royalty and senior producers are the names he offered for people who will not live in the filings. They are businesses. They are not coins. Read them, or do not pretend you did the work.
In the possibility box, only what you can lose. A frontier oil explorer, a hated country, a silver stock bought because the metal is no longer hated, a lithium story that is still profitable. Each can work. None of them inherits gold’s job just because the dollar is sick. If the copper price fails to rise with the acid bill, the shareholder is the cushion. If oil falls because an armistice meets destroyed demand, the explorer is the cushion. If silver’s rocket already flew, the late buyer is the cushion. Breakfast comes first.
Give the possibility five years or do not give it capital. A twelve-month hold was, in his mouth, a request he does not know how to answer except with nothing. Match the time to the unanswered questions in the ground. One hour a month per name, on documents, or cut the list until the hours fit. If a price drop makes you want to sell and you cannot say what the asset is worth, you are not speculating. You are renting a feeling. Feelings get margin-called by the weekend.
Do not let a government cheque, a war headline, or a record copper price do the valuation. He thinks the economy has taken more punches than it should have, and he thinks more paper money is likely. He also thinks markets respond. They find sulfur. They use less oil. They leave the shareholder holding the higher cost. The 1970s are his map for the dollar and for gold. They are not his map for a locked-step commodity boom. The investor who buys the whole map will own a lot of possibilities and call them protection. Protection, in his three boxes, is the savings and the probability. The rest is a bet you can afford to lose, held long enough to deserve the winner that pays for the losers.
The close
Rule’s hour was a refusal. Gold near $4,300 can still go sideways or down if the dollar stays bid. It can also be the underowned, high-probability answer to a decade in which savings yields do not cover the decay of the paper, and in which he would not be surprised to see the gold price rise three- or fourfold without matching the old 26-fold moonshot. Copper’s deficit is real and not a promise. Acid at $700 sulfur is a gift to the sulfur owner and a bill that can land on the mining shareholder. Silver was the right speculation when it was despised and the wrong one, for him, once the rocket lit. Lithium is not hated. Countries sometimes are, and those bets have gone to zero in his own book. He will not pick a stock for a year. He will not pick one for five years out loud while he is still buying it.
The idea is small enough to use on Monday. The loss of purchasing power is not a buy signal for every commodity. Gold is the probability, and most people do not own enough of it. Everything else is a possibility. Possibilities can pay for a career if they are sized like breakfast and held like a five-year question. Spent like a sure thing, they are just the next story. Markets will work. They will work on you if you needed them to work only in your direction.
Important information
This article is for information and education only. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, metal, or currency. Mining and exploration shares can go to zero. Past bull markets are not a schedule.
The account follows Rick Rule’s September 28, 2026, interview on The Sunday Roast with Phil Carroll and Kevin Hornsby. Gold near $4,300, the March warning above $5,000, silver’s move, the $75-to-$700 sulfur figure, Resolution’s tons and grade, Mountain Pass, the entitlement arithmetic, and the 1970s multiples are his statements or the hosts’ figures as he responded to them. They are not a fresh audit. He declined to name a company he said he was buying. Later segments of the same episode discussed other small shares. Those comments were the hosts’, not his, and they are outside this idea. This article does not consider any person’s goals or finances.