Friday, May 1st, 2026
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning
Thanks for all the greatest questions you sent last week for Rick Rule. I sat down with the founder of the Rule Symposium on Natural Resource Investing earlier this week. The transcript AND the video are below.
Enjoy…and see you next week!
Dan
P.S. Off camera, Rick told me this year is the first time in over ten that physical attendance to his conference has been completely sold out. Such is the interest in gold, silver, copper, uranium, natural gas, nuclear and the rest of the raw materials of civilization. I’ve participated remotely the last two years and you can do the same by signing up here.
Dan Denning: Welcome back to Bonner Private Research for the latest private briefing with an old friend, Rick Rule is joining us. Rick, I neglected to ask where you are joining us from today. Where are you at?
Rick Rule: I live in the outskirts of a little village called Anacortes, Washington, and I am mercifully at home today. Lovely spring day in the Northwest.
Dan: Well, I’m glad to hear that. And I know you’ll be on the road in July, which I want to tell our readers about in a minute. I wanted to thank you for joining this on short notice. We have a ton of questions from Bonner Private Research subscribers. If you’re new to Bonner Private Research and you have somehow avoided seeing Rick’s face or hearing his wisdom on the natural resource market, Rick is a longtime friend of Bill Bonner.
In his current iteration, he is the founder and CEO of Rural Investment Media. And more importantly, for investors, he is the founder of the Rural Symposium on Natural Resources, which again will be held this year in Boca Raton, Florida, July 6th through the 10th. I’m sorry to say that if you tarried and did not secure your ticket to attend the event in person, it’s too late.
You cannot go in person. However, because Rick and his team are on top of it, it is possible, and I highly recommend that you sign up for the digital attendance, which allows you to participate live in the entire event. And more importantly, which I’ve benefited from a lot the last few years, you can review and watch any session you want at any time for up to a year after the event.
There’s so much that goes on that in some ways, if you’re not going to be in the room, it’s the best way to get the most out of the event. Do I have that right, Rick? And is there anything I missed?
Rick Rule: No, I think that’s accurate. We’ve worked, as you suggest, very hard for the last five years on the digital event. And it’s nice, last year we had 1,400 attendees from 33 countries. We offer all attendees, live or live stream, absolute unconditional money back guarantee.
If people aren’t happy with the value that they received, I’m delighted to say, out of 1,400 digital attendees worldwide, we had three refund requests last year. So obviously our investment in technology and our investment in Paul Harris, who’s the one who coordinates the digital presentation with the live presentation, has paid off.
Dan: Yeah, it’s really seamless. And one of the benefits for BPR readers is, once you’re logged into the system to watch, you can also chat with vendors who are there. You can send them messages, or you can chat with other attendees.
So even though you’re not in the room literally, there’s a lot of interaction to talk about some big ideas. And boy, are there a lot of big ideas to talk about this year? So I want to start with one that’s new since we even agreed to talk this week and frame it as a question. Earlier today, I read, haven’t confirmed that the United Arab Emirates has expressed its intention to leave the organization of petroleum exporting countries.
So UAE is leaving OPEC. I’m going to ask this as an open-ended question, but you can do whatever you want with it. Who’s the biggest winner from this war with Iran?
Is it a country? Is it a commodity? And if it’s a commodity, is it energy in general or is it a specific form of energy?
Rick Rule: I’m not sure there is a winner. If I was going to be opportunistic in attempting to use the war to my portfolio’s advantage, my temptation would be to default to Canadian oil and gas producers.
It could be that the heightened political risk in the rest of the world offsets the already high political risk in Canada.
And Canada would seem to be a potential beneficiary of a temporary or even other than temporary increase in oil and gas prices. The other thing is that Canada’s political leadership has been leery to allow expanded oil and gas production. The former prime minister saying that there was no business case for the export of Canadian oil and gas.
He said that despite six foreign countries evidencing interest in that, but it could be that increased public knowledge of the insecurity that global consumers feel with regards to oil and gas will change the political equation around the potential export of Canadian oil and gas, particularly given the incredible budget deficits that Canada enjoys, if that’s the right phrase.
So if I was going to find a winner, I suspect it would likely be Canada. That notwithstanding, of course, I, like you, would prefer that peace occurred.
Dan: Yeah. And you’re quite right to point out from a human point of view, not even humanitarian, but just from a personal point of view, it’s always a little distasteful to describe war as having winners and losers from a financial perspective.
But it’s such a disruptive event in terms of energy policy that I think there’s some other questions I want to follow up with, but I wanted to follow up on behalf of Tom Dyson, who’s, as you know, the investment director of Bonner Private Research. He was curious about some news that came out this week.
And then another reader asked about this as well. Tom recommended in the first week of December last year, ARC Resources, which was one of eight oil and gas stocks. And then earlier this week, Shell has said they would like to buy ARC Resources. So does this fit into your Canada thesis and what do you think of the offer that was made?
Rick Rule: It does, and it’s bittersweet. ARC was my favorite of the Canadians. Very high quality management team. I used to tease myself by saying I competed against them. That’s not true. I got the business that was left over. Very, very, very high quality people, very, very high quality company.
They stumbled recently, last two years on one big investment, which left the opportunity for Shell to come back into Canada by taking over ARC. I guess if I have the choice between getting paid now and getting paid later, probably I prefer to get paid now. I will not be a holder of my Shell shares. I would have preferred to continue to own ARC. That’s not an offer. I will, likely this week, at the very least, collar the arbitrage between ARC and Shell.
While I think the offer is a fair offer based on current market, I think the upside for me as an ARC shareholder was greater than my likely upside will be as a Shell holder.
There are some aspects of Shell, which by the way, are attractive. It’s a much better company than it was five years ago. The emphasis on gas in Shell, their increasing capabilities in gas production and trading is good. Their re-emphasis on frontier offshore oil and gas exploration is good.
That probably mostly offsets their, how would you say, European politically correct motivations of the last 10 years, and the fact that they haven’t maintained their sustaining capital investments in the US.
It could be that a ship the size of Shell will never be as efficient as I would hope, or as efficient as ARC. All of the above notwithstanding, given that I have fairly representative investments across the oil space, I won’t be a Shell holder.
Dan: Okay. That’s a great answer. I know Tom will have more for our readers because he also at that same time in December of last year recommended some larger producing companies. And I guess that leads me to my second question before I get to the reader questions, is the amount of cashflow that the oil companies have generated in the first quarter since the war started.
But also the gold companies, I’m sure you saw that the story that Newmont Mining generated $3.1 billion in free cash flow in the first quarter, which is around $100 million a day, which according to the story I read was, on an annualized basis would be more than Coca-Cola. With all that money, are we now looking at the M&A phase of the precious metals market or indeed the energy market, where the larger majors with tons of cash start buying smaller companies?
And if that’s true, how are you incorporating that into your strategy?
Rick Rule: Yes and yes. It isn’t merely a consequence of larger free cash balances. It is also the case that in both the oil and gas industry and the mining business, that the companies for 20 years or 30 years in the case of the oil business, have underinvested substantially and their ability to maintain, never mind increase production, is going to be increasingly constrained by past sins.
The big companies are going to be incapable of growing organically because they don’t have the pipelines that they would’ve had four years ago. The only way that they’re going to be able to maintain their production and hence their cashflow in the out years is going to be by acquiring smaller companies. It’s also true that bigger companies have greater trading liquidity and hence more trading volume and hence lower cost of capital.
In expected businesses, cost of capital is a decided advantage. So either value arbitrageurs like myself bid up the prices of small companies relative to large companies or the large companies take over the small companies. I think we’re coming into a period now where we see heightened M&A activity really across the landscape, big guys taking over little guys, multi-asset producers, which are less risky than single asset producers, eliminating the value arbitrage by taking over the single asset producers.
And importantly, both strategic and horizontal mergers. You will see smaller companies taking over smaller companies simply to become bigger, to be included in more indexes and get more passive buying. But yes, what you say is correct. With regards to the cash flow around Newmont, I want to add one thing.
I am nervous that this cashflow growth flattens out because during periods of low commodity prices, what many companies do without disclosing it as well as they should is high grade, which is to say during periods of low prices, companies often produce their low hanging fruit. What that means is that when the price of commodities goes up and they shift back to lower quality material, they’re okay for a year or two, but taking the high grade material out of the low grade envelope and mining only the low grade remaining material, means that their costs relative to units of production increases.
And I’m afraid that in the gold business with the big legacy producers, we’re going to see that. That’s not an accusation. I don’t know it to be true. And I’ve meant to go through the Newmont income statement for the last five or six years and look at the variability between the grade produced in a given year and the median reserve grades over the life of mines.
If you see companies that report costs on a unit production basis, which is to say a per ounce basis, without taking charges for excess depletion, when they mine grades that are substantially above the median reserve grade, what they’re really doing is high grading.
And I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t taken the time to sort through the gold business to find out which guys were and which guys weren’t high grading.
Dan: Well, it’s useful to know. I hadn’t heard that term. Maybe just to follow up on that general thesis, I’d seen somewhere recently that Robert Friedland had talked about interruptions in the ability of copper mines or other mines to operate as a result of not only higher fuel prices, which were a factor, or at least a factor to their margins, assuming the fuel was available, but then some of the distillate products that are used in the mining industry.
One of our themes has been, it doesn’t seem that any of the second or third order effects of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have yet resulted in either much higher commodity prices or actual scarcity in physical bottlenecks. Is that something you think might happen still? .
Rick Rule: Both are completely accurate statements. I would suggest to you that the increase in oil prices that we’ve seen as a consequence of the Gulf conflict have been anticipatory, which is to say the price has gone up because there will be shortages rather than there are shortages.
There were floating inventories and there were strategic petroleum reserves around the world, and the price increases that we’ve seen reflect a concern over supply rather than actual supply. In some fairly short period of time, if the crisis isn’t resolved, you’re going to go to rationing oil by price as opposed to prices in anticipation of rationing.
You’re already seeing loaded cargoes south of the Straits trading at $40 per barrel premiums to posted spot rates. So while the quote may be $100, that same oil delivered into Pakistan or Sri Lanka, or for that matter Perth, commands $140, which is to say a $40 premium.
If this conflict continues, I’m afraid you ain’t seen nothing yet. The second thing that a lot of people miss is that the response in prices is inconsistent, which is to say the lighter fragments, things like diesel and jet fuel have really been impacted, and that likely continues.
The crack spread, the premium, as an example, that jet fuel or diesel might command suggest that the refiners are making incredible margins if they can get product, which obviously they can’t. And so you’re going to see the shortages spread unequally across products by weight.
And I think I saw an announcement that KLM is planning to shut down a variety of European flights due to the absolute unavailability, the price due, but the unavailability of jet fuel. You may see some mines in Western Australia similarly constrained, not merely by the price associated with diesel, but rather as a consequence, both of the Gulf conflict and Australia’s idiotic shortage of refining capacity, constrained by the unavailability of diesel.
I don’t think you have any fear of that for two or three weeks, but two or three weeks is a fairly short time. I guess what I’m trying to leave your listeners with is, the price increases that you have seen aren’t necessarily reflective of the price increases that you will see if the crisis continues.
Dan: That’s a really good point. That’s one reason I’m doing this interview from Laramie and not Australia. I was supposed to go down there and didn’t want to get stuck down there again for a variety of number of reasons.
But let’s move on to the reader questions because there’s a ton of them. Some are general, some are specific. I’ll just go in the order in which they arrived.
“Hi, Dan. Could you please ask Rick Rule which investment he considers best? Gold, silver, copper, platinum, or uranium?” I think you have to choose from those. “And does he prefer the precious metals physically or as stocks?”
Rick Rule: Sadly, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on the investor. Investors who don’t have sufficient savings should consider having some savings in gold. So for the new investor, for the less wealthy investor, for the investor whose lifestyle will be challenged by a decade where I believe the US dollar will lose 75% of its purchasing power, for a investor with a fixed income, a pension, gold. Gold, what you’re looking at is not making money. You’re looking at survival. You’re looking at the maintenance of some semblage of your lifestyle.
Dan, I was around in the decade of the ‘70s personally, and I was old enough to be cognizant. In the decade of the ‘70s, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the US dollar lost 75% of its purchasing power. Which meant that a pensioner that went into the decade in 1970, the basket of goods and services that he or she bought for $1,000, by the end of the decade cost $4,000.
What that means for many of your listeners is that their savings and their retirement income will be insufficient to fund the lifestyle that they would like to become accustomed to or are accustomed to over the next ten years.
And there’s no hope coming. I mean, people need to understand that. The entitlement system in the United States is $120 trillion upside down. So the idea that the state is going to come to your assistance is a misnomer. For you, gold. For an investor in a different circumstance, which is to say a Rick Rule, if I had one place out of all of those to be, I would probably be in the high quality uranium equities. The reason for that is twofold. The unsung beneficiary of the Gulf conflict really, and this is the way I should have answered your prior question, is uranium.
The incredible buildup of the French nuclear fleet and the Japanese nuclear fleet, now numbers three and four worldwide, were a consequence of the Arab oil embargo. When energy security became a national concern, the Japanese noted that they could store enough uranium because of its energy density in one warehouse to power Japan for five years.
That lesson was lost on Japan in the aftermath of Fukushima, and now they’ve got a slap in the face, a real dose of reality. And I suspect on a global basis, in addition to the other attributes of uranium, which is to say reliable base load power, non-carbon generation, we’re reintroducing the concept of energy security. And if you couple that with the fact that the structure of the uranium market itself has changed, where unlike any other commodity in the world, which trades primarily at spot, uranium trades in contractor term markets.
What that means is that producers and consumers can enter into binding contracts that specify price and term for a long period of time. With the boom in new uranium plant construction now, the lenders are frequently requiring the nuclear power plant builders to obtain enough supply in the contract market to amortize the loan, unlike any other commodity where price variability in the out years is extraordinary.
In the uranium business, both price and volume can be predetermined for the very long term. And that makes, to me, the high quality uranium equities, the people who will have the productive capacity to fuel the demand for nuclear power plants in the future, particularly attractive speculations.
Dan: I don’t disagree with a word of that. How does Sprott play into this, by the way? And you can elaborate on your previous involvement with them, but they have several ways for investors to participate in this and one of them is just a huge pile of uranium.
Rick Rule: It might be that the lowest risk, or certainly the lowest effort would be to buy uranium. Uranium is not a substance which you either legally or are advised to store at home. And Sprott is the largest owner of physical uranium that we know of, finished uranium on the planet. They own on behalf of investors 82 million pounds in a vehicle called the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust.
And buying this physical uranium, having Sprott store it for you in licensed locations around the world is a wonderful way to play this circumstance. It trades like water. So to the extent that you want to buy it and sell it, at least in mortals quantities, you can buy this stuff on the exchange, sell it on the exchange. You don’t have to do anything. They store it, they insure it, they do everything. So that’s a wonderful way to play it, probably, particularly for people who have no exposure.
The other way to play it is, in effect, the Exxon of the uranium business, which is Cameco [CCJ], the largest and highest quality full service uranium company on the planet. They do everything from explore uranium, to operate nuclear power plants, and sell watts.
The stock has had a tremendous run-up, albeit from a limited base, but current dynamics in the uranium market are not reflected in either the uranium price or in the Cameco price.
Dan: Yeah. I think that’s well worth following up on because one of the phrases I’ve seen in relation to what happens after the end of the war is, we have a global energy market in terms of demand, but the supply might turn out to be heavily influenced by regional geography and who your neighbors are and how much of a particular resource they have. So there may be more opportunities there later this year.
Rick Rule: Even a poor country like Sri Lanka, and you rely on thermal, which is to say coal, oil and gas for your electricity, 80% of your electricity. While $6 billion is not an inconsequential sum to spend to build a modern nuclear power plant, that’s a cheap one, by the way. And those prices, those costs will come down as the volume goes up.
The price that Sri Lanka is having to pay right now in terms of economic output as a consequence of restricted liquefied natural gas and petroleum prices is one that I think will cause even a very poor country like Sri Lanka to rethink the calculus of the upfront capital cost as against the security of having nuclear power.
Dan: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s the best moment for a long time for nuclear. Let’s talk about something that hasn’t had a lot of great moments or had a very good moment earlier in the year and then a very bad moment. This is a question about silver. “If Rick sold out of his silver position earlier in this year, what was the reasoning behind the move and what does he see silver doing in the near future?”
Rick Rule: Well, you see, I don’t see the silver price as down because I measure it from $17. I just considered it as less far up. And again, the answer is individual. It’s not one-size-fits-all. For me, silver in my portfolio was a speculative position. I had it in a speculative bucket of my portfolio. Now, Tom, or pardon me, Dan, you know I’m a speculator. So my speculative bucket’s fairly large, but I’m fairly specific. I bought silver because it was hated, and I bought it because at least in terms of primary production, not byproduct production, but primary production, it was cheap.
The price of silver didn’t justify the capital cost associated with mining silver. And so either the silver price went up or the silver mines were shut down. Those were my two choices. But I bought it more because when I looked at social media posts concerning silver, they were sort of 19 to one negative, and a speculator learns to love/hate, at least a speculator that’s in a natural resource-based investment. So I bought silver thinking that as it became, if it became less hated, that the price would go up. And you know what happened? The price went up.
So when the price went up, the reason I owned it went away. If I thought the price was going to go from 17 to 50, and instead it went from 17 to 70, a lot of my reason for owning silver went away. So I needed to rethink my speculative position.
And here’s the interesting arithmetic I came up with. As a speculator, I was better off owning the silver stocks than silver because the silver stocks were trading on the market, assuming $45 silver and the market was paying 70 for it. Now there’s three circumstances that could happen. The price of silver could go up, that could happen, and the silver stocks would benefit.
The silver price could go sideways, which by definition meant I didn’t make any money on my silver. But the silver stocks priced at a $45 assumption could still go up, even though the silver price couldn’t go up, or the silver price could go down.
And if the silver price went down, the inherent discount implied in the price of the silver stocks meant that at least arithmetically, the silver stocks would lose value less rapidly than the stocks. And so when I sold, I sold 80% of my silver position, not my entire silver position.
When I sold that, I redeployed about half the money into silver stocks, high quality ones. I put a quarter of the money into savings, primarily gold bullion, but also short-term US treasuries, and I put a quarter of the money in oil and gas stocks, not because I anticipated the Gulf War, but rather because oil and gas was hated at the time. And again, I was buying hate and selling love.
That doesn’t presuppose that everybody else should do that. Most people were unwilling to buy silver when it was hated. They needed the psychological reinforcement of the price action to justify the narrative. The difficulty with that is that when you get the price action that justifies the narrative, most of the value of the narrative’s already gone.
Dan: Right.
Rick Rule: I hope that answers the question.
Dan: It does. No, it does. I mean, we could take a deeper dive on demand for silver and deficits, but I think we’ve talked about it enough before that that covers the specific question directed at you. Here’s a question about copper. It’s slightly longer, but I’ll read it anyway. “Given your view, I assume this is your view, on the structural copper deficit and the quote, ‘need to steal from host governments, by host governments,’ how do you weigh the optionality of the Cobre Panama restart against the rising jurisdictional risk in Latin America, with Franco-Nevada trading at a premium again and the stockpile processing approved, is the Panama discount fully gone or are we underestimating the cost of the new social license required to fully open?”
That’s a big question, and it assumes a lot of familiarity with terms you’ve used before.
Rick Rule: We haven’t seen the social cost reopen. We haven’t seen the agreement between the Panamanian government And First Quantum and Franco-Nevada. Doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, but we haven’t seen it. I believe that... I mean, this is still a very open political question in Panama. About 40% of the people in the country, people who I suspect are enumerate, oppose the reopening of the mine, which is to say that they’re putting rhetoric, environmental rhetoric or some other kind of rhetoric ahead of the fact that their country’s insolvent.
And ahead of the fact that the contracts around the agreement between Cobre Panama and the Republic of Panama are subject to international arbitration. And if the mine shuts down, Panama’s going to lose a bunch of money that it doesn’t already have. So from a fiscal perspective, the reopening of the mine is an inevitability, assuming that the voters in Panama become numerate.
Dan: That seems like a big assumption.
Rick Rule: Well, I suspect right now one impact is that that mine at $6 copper is going to make a whole bunch more money than that mine made at 3.50. And there’s probably a little bit to go around. One potential impasse of that would be to give the country of Panama some access to the upside, which is to say, in effect, give them a stream, the right, but not the obligation to buy some copper at a fixed price for a period of time in the future. That stream, depending on the nature of the stream, could be turned into cash now, which is to say the government of Panama, rather than keeping the stream, could sell a stream and raise money, and they need the money in the worst way.
I suspect that there is upside both in First Quantum and in Franco-Nevada, because I think that there’s a probability, not a certainty, but rather a probability that negotiations are ultimately successful and the mine comes back into production.
I have been assured, although I don’t know personally, I’ve been assured by the company that the mine has been on, what’s called hot shut, which means that they shut it down, but they kept the operations in good condition so that it can be restarted, including the plant, on fairly short notice. I noticed too, the Panamanian government has given First Quantum now license to process the stockpiles, which means that they’re going to turn the plant on.
And assuming that the impasse and negotiations is resolved, that the plant could relatively efficiently move from stockpiled material to new mined material without too long a delay, which would of course be a very good thing.
Dan: Excellent. That’s a thorough answer. I’ll just give you two more, and then we’ll release you to your adoring hoards on the internet who probably are requesting massive amounts of your time. This is a general one. If there is a stock market crash, how will gold, silver, and the mining stocks react? Will they fall significantly, but bounce back quicker than the general market? What’s your risk here?
Rick Rule: I think the answer to that is yes and yes. It’s important to remember that gold stocks are stocks. It’s important too, to look back at history. In 1987, as I recall, the gold complex held up for 24 hours before it got crushed too. It’s important to know that in the liquidity squeeze, the sell decision is seldom made by the speculator, but rather by the margin clerk.
And the margin clerk doesn’t have favors. The margin clerk looks for something that has a bid, and gold always has a bid, so it will be sold. In prior liquidity-driven crashes, two things have occurred. Assets that are regarded as higher quality assets, which often include gold, come back quicker.
The second thing that happens is the fiscal response to a liquidity crisis is very often artificially low interest rates and quantitative easing, also known as counterfeiting.
Traditionally, both of those responses have led to concerns about the maintenance of purchasing power in fiat currencies and have been very good for gold, which is to say that gold often bounces back first because of its perception as a high quality low risk asset, and then bounces back too as a consequence of the policies that the governments have enacted to shield the citizenry from the worst aspects of the liquidity squeeze.
Dan: Yeah. It’s a really interesting question from a political angle or monetary policy angle that with monetary policy being more effectively politicized in the US, you have a new Fed chairman, you’re going to have a lot of pressure to lower interest rates in order to goose GDP before the midterm elections. And then you’re in that 24 month period, really less, where a new president will be elected. And if there’s Republicans in control of Congress, they’re going to want the economy to be... Well, they want to run it hot. We would say CPI will be officially 4%, but probably more like 9%, which it’s hard to imagine gold not doing well in that situation.
Rick Rule: Dan, I’ve been cognizant now for, I don’t know, 55 years, something like that, maybe economically literate for 45 years. I’ve seen two periods of time in my life when the United States attempted to let the market set interest rates, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for that occurring this time through.
I would also suggest that we stop referring to the CPI, except as perhaps by the moniker, the CP lie. The idea, if you yourself, Dan, looked at the price escalation, a basket of goods and services that you consume now relative to the year 2020, the idea that your purchasing power was deteriorating at 2.5% a year compounded is stupid. You’ll remember that when it’s inconvenient to them, the index doesn’t include food or fuel. Well, I don’t know about you, but any index doesn’t include lunch is of no use to me whatsoever. And on top of that, it doesn’t include tax.
If I didn’t have to pay the tax, maybe I wouldn’t bitch quite so much about the index, but when people are thinking about inflation and they use as a baseline, the CPI, they’re making a huge mistake in their baseline assumption. I listen all the time to conference calls around major resource developers, and they’re all saying that the escalation in the construction inputs and the operating inputs that they’re facing, including labor, is growing by 12 to 15% a year.
How is it that the CPI stated rate of inflation is at 2.9 when the input costs associated with major heavy industries in the country are increasing at 12 to 15% compounded? The answer is they aren’t. It’s a joke.
Dan: Yeah. It brings me to my last question for you, and I’ll preface it by a story I read today on X, and I can’t remember if it was the Sumerian Empire, Babylon Empire. It was one of the empires in the Levant. And the paper record showed that as the empire was collapsing, literally collapsing, like the sinews of trade globally were falling apart. The world was becoming less connected as the empire fell apart.
The people in the center of the empire were busy sending effectively memos to each other about administrative affairs. And the modern equivalent of looking at spreadsheets and having a Zoom call or a Slack call about whether the rate of inflation in insurance premiums was accurate. They were missing the fact that the price level went up by 40% in two years and it entirely shifted. It is not coming down. But it gets back to the point you made about golden purchasing power, which is the last question I had from a reader.
“Please ask Rick what he thinks about buying PACS gold as a digital way to buy gold. The company argues they hold the physical and they are audited annually.” And my addendum to that would be, is there a better way for people to earn interest while preserving their purchasing power than a conventional bank?
Rick Rule: I’m fascinated by Tether and PACS and Argo. I mean, really, truly fascinated. What holds me back, although I am a shareholder in Argo, I can’t deny that. What holds me back is that none of them publish balance sheets or income statements. And the idea that somebody is holding my wealth for me in proxy where I can’t see the balance sheet or the income statement, which is to say, I don’t know anything about the solvency of my fiduciary is of no use to me whatsoever.
I remember back in 2011 helping the Sprott organization create the Sprott Physical Gold Trust and the Silver Trust, and I was talking about ways to make the trust more efficient, which would’ve increased counterparty risk. And the guy whose name was on the door, Eric Sprott, who was going to invest a quarter billion dollars in those products, said, “Rick, I’m doing this to reduce my risk. I’m not doing this to increase my risk.”
So I would argue that at present, digital gold is a speculation as opposed to savings because you don’t understand anything about the solvency of the fiduciary. And if the fiduciary ended up in chapter 11, the fiduciary of your savings would be a US bankruptcy court. I have enough experience with the mechanisms of bankruptcy courts that I don’t want to face that. So I would prefer to hold my gold... Well, I mean, at Battle Bank, we hold all our gold at Brink’s. It isn’t because the service that we get from Brink’s is better than the service that we might get other places, right now far from it. It is the fact that only Brink’s and Loomis have storage facilities that are owned in publicly traded companies where I can see the balance sheet and I can see the income statement, and where if they lie to me, it’s a federal offense, not a civil offense.
I don’t have to sue them. I don’t have my gold to increase my risk. I want any gold instrument I have to be redeemable, which means I want to be able to trade my piece of paper for the real thing, and I want the fiduciary to be solvent, and I want my gold to be stored by a fiduciary that’s solvent too. If you hold gold as a speculation, if you hold it merely because you think the price is going to go up, not because you think you might need it. If you’re speculating in gold, then you can consider less secure forms of ownership. I speculate in gold stocks. I save in gold, and those are very, very, very different motivations.
Dan: Yeah, I agree. And I think that’s a good answer. It’s exciting to me too. I love the idea of tokenized gold and being able to use that.
Rick Rule: Well, using it for money is something I really look forward to. I really, really, really do look forward to it. I look forward to a gold coin or gold token that is floated by a solvent reporting intermediary that’s redeemable. And I mean, the technology exists now. The regulation to allow it doesn’t exist yet.
Dan: Yeah. Well, let’s hope it happens soon. Let’s hope it happens before, but probably not, before July 6th through the 10th, which in case you missed the beginning, Rick will be the host of the Natural Resource Investing Symposium. And according to your website, if my math is correct, that’s 68 days, 20 hours and 53 seconds from now. So you have some time to register, but don’t wait too long because from uranium to silver to gold, copper, energy, oil and gas, there really couldn’t be a better time. I mean, actually maybe that’ll be my last question to you. How do you put this year in the context of previous events in terms of your level of enthusiasm or excitement about the opportunities that natural resource investors have right now?
Rick Rule: The content gets better every year. We’ve put on the conference for almost 30 years, actually since you all have owned it, since Agora owned it. And if you do something for 30 years, if you stood the test of time, and if you tried to make it better every year, after 30 years, it gets pretty good. We have learned the art of putting on conferences a little better and curating content a little better every year.
The online part of it gets better much more quickly because we’ve only been doing that for five years. The first year was a disaster. We couldn’t have done worse, but the conference will be better in that regard. It will be difficult for us to match the investment performance of the last two years, simply because the investment performance of the last two years was so exquisite.
What we can tell you is this, we can tell you that unlike any other investment conference on the planet, any public company exhibitor at our show must be owned in the accounts of the conference organizers. Now, there’s no guarantee that because I own a stock, it goes up, but there is a guarantee that I have vetted that company, an absolute guarantee.
And there’s no other conference I know of on the planet that has that same qualification, which I think is important. The second is that there’s no other investment conference I know of on the planet that has an unequivocal money back guarantee. If you think for any reason whatsoever that you didn’t get your money’s worth, I give you your money back. The third thing that we do that nobody else does is that I interview every single speaker and exhibitor at the conference before the conference, that you don’t have to pay to watch that, by the way.
You can go to YouTube, the Rural Investment Media Channel, and you can watch all those, but it’s meant to be used in conjunction with the conference because we give you over 46 hours, over four days, more content than you can absorb at the conference, much more.
The consequence of that is that we want you to arrive at the conference informed and be able to allocate your time better because you’re familiar with the speakers before you get to the floor, you’re familiar with the exhibitors before you get to the floor. And then unlike any other conference on the planet, afterwards, three months or four months afterwards, I interview every exhibitor again. I say, “Eight months ago, you said you were going to do this. At the conference, you said that you were going to do this. Now, here we are. Have you?” There’s no other conference that invests that much in the attendees.
There’s no other conference I know of that invests anywhere close to that much at the attendees. If you go to conferences to get away from your husband or wife, if you go for amusement purposes, don’t come to ours. If you buy the Sunday paper to do the crossword puzzle, our conference isn’t the place for you. If you come to make money in natural resource investment and speculation, absolutely do come. And if you don’t think I delivered value, let me know. I’ll give you your money back.
Dan: Well, if it’s not this year, there’s never going to be a time. And if it’s not this conference this year, I don’t think there’s any other conference that would make a bigger difference to the bottom line of individual investors than something like this. There’s just too many exciting things, risks as well, but the fact that you’ve done so much homework and that you’ve taken an hour of your time today to answer questions from BPR readers, Rick, it’s always a pleasure.
I always learn something and thanks again for your time. I look forward to talking to you next time. And for readers who are reading this or if you’re listening, we’ll have a link below to sign up for Rick’s conference. But Rick, thanks again for everything.
Rick Rule: Dan, thank you. I enjoy these conversations. One of the things that people who listen to me don’t know is how much work it is to be interviewed by a bad interviewer. And I enjoy talking with you. Sometimes my chore is to make the interviewer seem somewhat less stupid than he or she is. And it’s an absolute delight to be interviewed by somebody like you, and in fact, by your many listeners who also ask intelligent questions. So thank you for the ability to address your audience.
Dan: Oh, I’m flattered and I’ll pass that on to the readers because most of the questions were theirs. But Rick, until next time, we’ll talk to you soon, okay?
Rick Rule: Thank you, sir.