Ross Beaty has watched silver sit at four dollars for years, then ten, then thirty, then fifty, then fifteen, then thirty again. This time it ran to about one hundred and twenty and fell back toward sixty or sixty-five. Gold, in the same telling, ran from around two thousand dollars toward a high near five thousand five hundred. People are asking if that was the bull market. He does not think so. The reason is not a chart. The mines did not answer.
Here is the idea, and it is the only one. Judge the metal by the supply that can actually arrive, not by the price that already did. Gold and silver deposits are rare. Silver deposits are rarer. A giant move in the price has not produced a giant move in new production. More demand is still coming than new supply. That gap is the case he is willing to hold. The metals where governments and companies are already building the answer are a different trade. He thinks that answer shows up later as a lower price. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any metal, miner, or share.
The gap
He put the arithmetic in one place. Gold went from about one thousand and fifty dollars an ounce to four or five thousand. That is a giant move. Significant new gold and silver production did not follow. New mines are opening. He does not deny that. He says the new tonnes are smaller than the new demand. Anyone pricing a metal has to look at both sides. He says he does it all the time. Where is the next supply. Where does it sit on the cost curve. Can it still run if the price falls.
For gold and silver, his answer is that the industry cannot mint deposits because the quote went up. You find them or you do not. That is why he will say the previous highs get exceeded. He will not say when. He also will not pretend the path is a straight line. Gold can chop around four thousand dollars. Silver can chop around sixty. It can go lower before it goes higher. A crowd can still rush in together, out of stocks or bonds, for war, inflation, or a weaker dollar, and produce another spike. Central banks are already moving that way. None of that is a date. The date he refuses is the one that says the top is in because the chart looks tired.
Why he will not call this 2011
The host asked the fair question. After 2011, gold and silver took years to see those highs again. Could that happen now. Beaty said of course it could. Then he described why he does not think this is that hangover.
The 2011 peak followed the money poured into markets after 2008. Stocks, bonds, gold, silver, copper, zinc, and lead all rose together. Then policy tightened. The party ended. From about 2012 to about 2016, prices fell even though he still liked the long-term case. Long-term, for him, is not a hundred years and not a week. It is the stretch past a year or two. In 2015 and 2016, with gold near one thousand and fifty dollars, that stretch looked good enough to him to build a company rather than trade a quote.
He is not a metal trader. He is not a buyer of bars. He builds companies. He sold a renewable-power business in 2017 and started Equinox Gold in 2018, near the bottom, from a pile of pieces with no production. You do not start a gold company if you think the price is going down. Investors buy the shares when they are bullish, and the shares then move more than the metal. They also fall harder when the metal falls. He was bullish. He says he was right. He does not think the market is now in the hangover that began in 2011. Every cycle is different. He thinks this one is late. He does not think it is finished.
The price he does not need
Pierre Lassonde has talked about twenty-thousand-dollar gold. Beaty called him brilliant, said the number is not crazy, and said he is not that far out himself. Then he cut the number down to the only leverage he is willing to describe. You do not need twenty thousand, or seventeen thousand, to make a gold stock work. If gold rises one thousand dollars from here, which he called about twenty or twenty-five percent, he said the gold stocks can rise about one hundred percent. That is why a person owns the shares instead of the bar. The bar is the insurance. He borrowed Rick Rule’s line for that. You hold it and hope you never have to sell it, because the world in which you must is a miserable one.
Treat the double as his rule of thumb, not a law. It assumes the company has ounces, and that those ounces survive costs, a country, and a mine plan. A quote going up does not turn a bad asset into a good one. He has said the blunt version. An ordinary person can make money with one lucky drill hole. A genius cannot make money from a dog.
The metals that can answer
The same test, applied next door, flips the trade. Governments everywhere are trying to start mines at home, and not only in copper and iron. They want the small metals that China has dominated. Cobalt, rhenium, scandium, rare earths, tungsten. In a small market, a little new production is a lot of supply. If demand merely holds, the price comes down. He does not know if that is in three years or six. He knows the direction. Most of the new suppliers of those small metals will not survive a lower price. They will go broke. He is not a buyer of that crowd after the run they have already had. He looked for cobalt himself, found it hard to get outside the Congo, and watched battery makers design it out. A rare metal is not bullish if the customer can leave.
Copper is the harder case, and he does not give it the gold treatment. Demand, he said, is excellent. Copper is the metal of making power, moving power, and using power. Data centers and electrification pull on it. He still thinks a lot of new production arrives in something like five or six years, and that the new tonnes cap the upside. His gut is firmer than that. In four or five years, he thinks the copper price comes down, and comes down a fair amount. Demand may keep the fall from becoming a collapse. It does not, in his view, keep the price on this path forever.
He then undercut his own calendar, and the undercut belongs in the piece. In the copper group he ran for about twenty-five years, he counted eight or nine deposits. One went to Teck. One went to First Quantum. One went to a large Chinese buyer. One went to a large Japanese buyer. A royalty vehicle was sold. A couple of Canadian deposits, he said, sit today with NorthIsle and with Western Copper in the Yukon. After twenty years, he said, only one of the eight or nine is actually producing. Every country is still promoting copper. British Columbia is permitting mines. So is the rest of Canada, the United States, South America, and Africa. Juniors are still selling the stories. The deposits were real. The mines, mostly, were not. Hold both sentences. His gut says enough new copper arrives to hurt the price. His own list says most big deposits do not become mines on a promoter’s clock. The investor’s job is to tell a deposit from a mine, not to average them into a slogan.
He has been wrong on the other side of the ledger, and he said so. For a decade in wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal, he watched those costs fall and decided uranium could not compete. Nuclear plants are expensive, slow, and stuck with waste that stays dangerous. What he did not see was the load from data centers. Base-load power suddenly had a buyer that would not wait for a battery to get cheaper. Producers such as Cameco have done well. He missed it. He is not sure the move lasts past the highs. The miss is useful. A supply story can be right and still lose if demand shows up where you swore it would not.
Costs nibble. They do not close the gap.
The host raised diesel, after energy prices jumped. Beaty shrank it. Trucks and loaders burn diesel. An open pit burns more than an underground mine. At many operations that line is five or ten percent of cost. Raise that slice by half and the mine notices. It does not break. The broader bill is real. Labor wants more. Explosives cost more. Some mines are paying up for sulfuric acid. The local currency can help or hurt, and you cannot generalize across countries.
He put a number on the creep. All-in sustaining costs at gold mines, on his average, have risen from about one thousand five hundred dollars an ounce to about two thousand. If you are selling gold at four thousand, the margin is still wide. Inflation is eating some of it. He called the bite relatively small. A two-thousand-dollar cost and a four-thousand-dollar price is not a reason to ignore costs. It is a reason not to pretend fuel closed the investment case.
Where the gap pays, and where it does not
Pierre Lassonde drew a curve for how a mining share actually makes money. Beaty likes both ends and distrusts the middle. The first fortune is made between the discovery and the work that shows how big it is. A piece of land is worth nothing. One hole in the right rocks can be worth a great deal. A million dollars of drilling against a billion dollars of rock is the value added. Then comes the quiet. Permits, engineering, a social license, construction. Years. A single-asset company often drifts down through those years, because there is little news and the risks are still ahead. Some mines do not work at all. Those can go to zero. If the mine does start, and the startup risk passes, you get the second run. Production can last five years or fifty. That is where the cash is made.
He has used both doors. He counts about a dozen companies where the job was to find, define, take some risk out, and sell to a larger miner. The buyer then spends the years building, and keeps the second run. Four or five times he has built the operating company himself. Equinox is that kind of company. It is not a discovery-and-sell shop. The mission was a senior producer, more than a million ounces a year. He says it is there. The next objective, he said, is just under two million ounces from assets the company already owns. The company’s own 2026 guidance is lower if you count only the months after its merger. On a full-year combined basis, the figure it has published is about 1.1 million ounces, with a later path toward about two million from projects it already holds. His sentence matches the combined business, not a single-year stub. He is also no longer running it day to day. None of that is a reason to own the shares. It is a picture of a plan B that was the plan all along.
Most juniors narrate the other order. Plan A is a sale to a major and a takeover premium. He has built about fifteen mines. He says that sale usually does not arrive. Plan B is to build it yourself. Building a mine is harder than the sentence. Take the promoter’s version with a grain of salt. Before you own the story, know which plan is real.
Inside a cycle, the money usually moves in order. Large, liquid producers first. Then the mid-tier. Then the juniors. The juniors have already had a strong year. He will not rank the next leader. What he will say is that producers are trying to get bigger, Equinox among them, because size brings a higher multiple and because one mine in a hard place can sink a whole company. Majors are funding joint ventures. Investors are funding risky drill stories for the jump that comes if the hole works. Debt is still available even with higher interest rates. He called the moment frothy. Froth, he said, usually unwinds. He does not know when. For now he still thinks it is a reasonable time to be in the space, if you can tell a company from a promotion.
What you can check
His checklist is short. Look at the asset, the country, and the region. Look at the people. Look at whether they have enough money to do the thing they said they would do. Then look at whether they do it. A lot of teams raise money for one job and spend it on another. That is not a team he wants. A useful record is wealth created for shareholders, not a share count inflated to keep the lights on. The asset still outranks the résumé. The hole can save a weak team. The dog defeats a strong one.
If you are in the juniors, he wants a basket. Different companies, and not all in one district. One or two names is how a good geological idea becomes a bad financial year. Put in only what you can afford to lose. When the market turns, it turns before you have finished the argument, and the down leg can last three, four, or five years. Every company in the group goes down with it, including the careful ones. The last dollar does not belong there. He compared the junior end to a casino. The comparison was not a joke.
The one name he offered, unasked, was Blue Moon, which he called well run. He said it while explaining why he would not chase rare earths or tungsten after their runs, and why he is not a lithium bull. A compliment in an interview is not a research note. This page does not underwrite that company, or Equinox, or any producer.
What would make this reading wrong
The reading is wrong if gold and silver supply does answer. A string of large new mines, big enough to meet the demand he says is still arriving, would close the gap that the whole case sits on. Watch production, not the next rally. A price can rise for a year on money flows and still be a 2011 setup in disguise. He said that decade-long hangover is possible. He does not think we are in it. Production data, over years, is the referee.
The reading is wrong if you heard a calendar. He will not time the next high. He thinks copper’s new supply caps that metal in something like four to six years, and he has also just told you that almost none of his own big copper deposits became mines in twenty. Use the tension. Do not resolve it by buying every copper story, or by shorting the metal because a gut feeling had a number on it.
The reading is wrong if you skip the valley. The gap in gold supply does not pay you while a single-asset company spends years permitting and building with nothing to report. Some of those projects never start. The premium he likes is a deposit a large miner actually needs, in a place that miner can own, because large miners deplete what they have and must find more or buy it. That premium is real when it arrives. It is not owed to you because the gold price went up.
The idea, once
Ross Beaty’s test is simple, and he applies it in both directions. Gold and silver ran hard. The deposits are rare enough that new mine supply did not run with them. He thinks more demand is still coming than new ounces. That is why he will not call the bull market over, and why he does not need a twenty-thousand-dollar target to justify owning a real gold business. A smaller rise, if the ounces are real, is enough leverage for the shares. Copper and the small metals are the other side of the same test. There, he thinks supply can arrive, because governments are paying for it or because the deposits are already in inventories, and a small market breaks when the tonnes show up.
A price is not a mine. The bull market that still has his respect is the one without a supply response. Own that distinction. Let someone else own the chart.
A note on sources and limits
The price history, the supply comments, the cost ranges, the Lassonde-curve description, the copper timing, the eight-or-nine-deposit count, the uranium miss, and the portfolio remarks are Ross Beaty’s comments to Vladyslav Grabarskyy on the Wealth Building Blueprint. The twenty-thousand-dollar figure is Pierre Lassonde’s, as Beaty described it. The one-hundred-percent stock move on a one-thousand-dollar gold rise is Beaty’s illustration, not a forecast this page adopts. Equinox Gold has separately reported 2026 production guidance of 870,000 to 920,000 ounces, about 1.1 million ounces on a full-year combined basis after its merger, and a longer path toward about two million ounces from assets it already holds. All-in sustaining cost guidance from the company for 2026 sits near the two-thousand-dollar area he cited. His copper-group sales match the public record of the Lumina companies in outline, not in a line this article has audited deposit by deposit. Nothing here is investment advice or a solicitation. Mine supply, costs, and guidance change. Readers should read the company filings and should speak with a licensed adviser before any decision.