Overview
In this June 2026 interview with David Lin, Rick Rule delivers a detailed framework for navigating the current pullback in gold and gold equities, drawing on five decades of resource investing experience. Gold has retreated from a peak near $5,500 earlier in 2026 to roughly $4,200 at time of recording -- a 37% decline in the GDX -- while the gold miners bullish percent index sits near seven, one of its lowest readings on record. Rule's core argument is that this environment is not a cause for alarm but an opportunity for disciplined buyers who understand what they own and why they own it.
Rule separates his financial life into saving and investing. Gold is savings -- a store of purchasing power, not a trade. He has systematically bought gold since the $250-per-ounce era and sold only once, in 2009, to fund acquisitions in a catastrophically cheap credit market. His current response to gold's pullback from $5,500 is to continue buying, partly funded by the sale of 80% of his physical silver during its hyperbolic run earlier in 2026. His ultimate sell decision on bullion, he jokes, will be made by his estate.
The historical parallel he draws is 1975, not 2011. Between 1970 and 1975, gold ran from $35 to roughly $200 as inflation fears mounted. Congress allowed rates to rise and gold cratered to around $100. When political resolve broke and rates were forced back down, gold exploded from $100 to $850 -- a nearly ninefold move. Rule's read is that the current rate-driven correction is structurally similar, and that political expediency will again prevent a sustained defense of the dollar's purchasing power.
On Canada, Rule is blunt: the recession is an own goal by the political class, not a tariff symptom. Canada has exceptional human capital, an elite oil and gas technical workforce, and world-class natural resources -- yet has consistently misallocated all three through perverse fiscal incentives and infrastructure underinvestment. On inflation, he argues the CPI is a political artifact that understates actual purchasing power erosion, which he estimates at 8-10% compounded since 2020. The only credible funding mechanism for US and Canadian deficits, in his view, is artificially low rates and money printing -- a backdrop that favors gold and gold equities over time.
The interview closes with Rule's investment philosophy applied to the 2026 Rule Symposium (July 6-10, Boca Raton): all 70 exhibitors are companies he personally owns, drawn from a vetted pool that rejected over 130 applicants. His conference curriculum is shifting to include more oil and gas alongside mining, and he offers an unconditional money-back guarantee on attendance.
Why This Matters
Rule's "market as a facility" framework is one of the most durable mental models in resource investing. Most investors treat price movements as signals about value -- when gold falls, they conclude something is wrong. Rule inverts this: falling prices in an asset he understands simply mean he can acquire more of something worth owning at a lower cost. This is not a rhetorical position; it is reflected in his actual behavior. He sold silver into its hyperbolic run, converted the proceeds partly into gold, and plans to deploy conference profits into bullion. The framework is expressed in cash flow, not commentary.
The 1975 parallel is worth taking seriously because it is mechanism-based, not chart-based. Rule explicitly disclaims technical analysis and anchors his outlook in the political economics of debt management. The argument is simple: governments with large deficits and large refinancing requirements cannot politically sustain high real interest rates. The mechanism that broke gold in 1975 was temporary. The mechanism that drove it from $100 to $850 was structural -- and that structure has not changed. If anything, the US debt and deficit situation in 2026 is substantially more extreme than it was in 1975.
The Canada diagnosis is relevant for any investor in Canadian resource equities. Rule's point is that cheap Canadian natural gas is not a permanent condition -- it is a political condition. A change in policy direction could unlock enormous latent value. For investors already holding cheap Canadian gas assets, Rule's message is to hold: the political risk is real but the valuation discount is even more real. The same logic applies to the gold miner bullish percent index sitting near seven -- extreme pessimism is a historically reliable contrarian setup when the underlying commodity thesis is intact.
Finally, Rule's savings-versus-investing distinction matters for anyone building a long-term resource portfolio. Treating gold as a savings vehicle rather than a trade changes holding behavior entirely. It removes the pressure to sell during corrections and reframes the decision correctly: you only sell savings to fund something dramatically more compelling. This is a discipline that most investors talk about but few actually implement with the consistency Rule demonstrates.
Key Points
Quotable Moments
Rick Rule
"Most of your listeners believe that the market is a source of information. I consider the market to be a facility -- a place where I buy and sell fractional ownership of a business."
This single sentence encapsulates Rule's entire investing philosophy. Framing the market as a facility rather than a subject removes the emotional feedback loop that drives most investors to make poor decisions at both tops and bottoms.
Rick Rule
"To the extent that the market as a whole falls dramatically, that means some of the fractional ownership in businesses -- otherwise known as shares -- that I understand well enough to want to buy falls. That circumstance delights me. It absolutely positively delights me."
Unusually candid for a public figure to say he is "delighted" by market crashes. The emotional honesty here underscores how thoroughly Rule has internalized the value-versus-price distinction -- a genuine behavioral edge, not just a talking point.
Rick Rule
"The last time I sold gold was in 2009 -- and I didn't sell gold in 2009 because I thought the price was going down. I sold because there were other asset classes that were cheaper."
Demonstrates the savings-versus-investing framework in practice. He did not trade gold; he liquidated savings to fund a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The framing matters: the decision was not about gold's direction but about the relative value of alternatives.
Rick Rule
"The idea that Canada is experiencing weak growth in a period of very high energy prices is an astonishment. It took real skill to screw up a country as great as Canada."
Cuts through the political noise with a single observation: Canada's underperformance is impossible to explain by external forces alone. The candor and precision make it memorable and arguable -- not dismissive, but pointed.
Rick Rule
"Unless we have another 2008-style psychotic break in the market, the sell decision with regards to my bullion will be made by my estate, not by me."
A direct and memorable statement of conviction. More investors claim to be long-term holders than actually are. This quote makes the holding period concrete -- generational -- and shows the distinction between a savings position and a trade.
Rick Rule
"Why would anybody choose to become a eunuch? To the extent that politicians imposed a gold standard on themselves, they would become financial eunuchs."
Colorful and precise. The metaphor captures exactly why the gold standard will never be voluntarily restored: it removes the primary instrument of political power, which is the ability to spend and allocate without constraint.
Concepts and Ideas
Core Frameworks
Market as a Facility, Not a Subject
Most investors treat the market as a source of information -- rising prices mean things are good, falling prices mean things are bad. Rule rejects this entirely. For him, the market is simply a place to transact: to buy fractional ownership in businesses at prices he finds attractive or to sell when prices exceed his estimate of value. This reframing removes the emotional signal-chasing that drives most investment behavior. Price movements become logistical events, not verdict.
The practical consequence is that broad market declines are welcomed rather than feared. If prices fall across assets he owns or wants to own, his purchasing power goes further. The prerequisite for this mindset is genuine competence -- you can only be indifferent to price movements if you have done the work to understand what something is worth and why you own it.
Delta Between Price and Value
Rule's investment selection criterion is straightforward: he buys when price is below his estimate of value (or expected future value) and sells when the gap closes or reverses. He applies this at the individual stock level and at the asset class level. The same logic that governs a coat purchase -- buy a good coat on sale -- governs his resource equity decisions.
For smaller resource companies, value is often intangible: management track record, geological knowledge, reliability. These qualitative inputs shape the discount or premium he assigns to the quantitative output. He ranks companies 1-10 on this basis and makes both holdings and conference exhibitor selections accordingly.
Saving in Gold vs. Investing for Returns
Rule draws a hard line between his savings activity and his investing activity. Gold is savings -- its purpose is to preserve purchasing power across time, not to generate returns. He does not try to trade gold, time it, or optimize entry prices. He buys it systematically when liquidity events generate cash, and he holds it indefinitely. Returns come from investing in businesses and resource equities, not from his bullion position.
The only exception is the 2009 sale, when post-crisis markets offered financial assets at such extreme discounts that liquidating savings to fund acquisitions was clearly the right capital allocation. This underscores the key rule: you only draw on savings to fund something dramatically more compelling, not to manage near-term volatility or respond to price signals.
Historical Parallels and Macro Frameworks
The 1975 Parallel
Between 1970 and 1975, gold ran from a controlled $35 to roughly $200 as inflation fears grew. Congress, unusually, allowed interest rates to rise to fight inflation, which cratered gold to around $100. The equity and bond markets also suffered, new home construction fell, and durable goods sales declined. Political resolve broke, rates were engineered back down, and gold ran from $100 to $850. It took Paul Volcker's rate tripling to finally break the gold bull market in 1981, when gold had to compete against treasuries yielding 15%.
Rule's read of the current situation is that the mechanism is identical -- interest rates are rising, gold is correcting, and political pain is mounting. But the fiscal position of the US in 2026 is far more extreme than 1975, making a Volcker-style sustained defense of purchasing power even less politically viable. He expects political resolve to break again, with similar consequences for gold.
The Real Inflation Rate vs. CPI
Rule argues the CPI understates actual purchasing power erosion because core CPI excludes food and fuel -- two inescapable household expenditures. He estimates that individuals who compare what they paid for necessities in 2020 versus 2026 would find erosion closer to 8-10% compounded, versus official CPI readings well below that. The CPI, in his framing, is a political tool rather than an honest cost-of-living index.
The investment implication: if actual inflation is substantially higher than reported, the real return on most conventional savings vehicles is negative. An asset that preserves purchasing power -- gold -- becomes more valuable relative to the alternatives than nominal price comparisons suggest.
Deficit Monetization as the Path of Least Resistance
The US and Canadian governments face structurally large deficits and near-term refinancing needs that Rule describes as enormous. The Iran war added approximately $500 billion in direct expenditure to the US, moving the annual deficit run rate from $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion. Political incentives make genuine fiscal consolidation implausible. Rule argues the only feasible funding mechanism is artificially low interest rates (to reduce the interest component of the debt) combined with quantitative easing (money printing).
If that path is taken, the beneficiaries are assets that hold purchasing power: gold first, then gold equities as levered expressions of the same theme. His estimate is that gold's market share of total investment assets -- currently around 0.5% -- would need to quadruple just to return to its four-decade mean of 2%.
Investment Strategy
Three-Tier Portfolio Structure
Rule divides his resource equity holdings into three categories. Core holdings are high-quality royalty and streaming companies -- Franco-Nevada, Agnico Eagle, Wheaton -- that he holds indefinitely and expects to compound over decades. Active holdings are positions where he has not yet recovered his capital and is watching for a catalyst. Passive holdings are positions where he has sold enough to recover all capital and now holds a free carry with no capital at risk, monitoring but not actively managing.
This structure separates holdings by stage of capital recovery rather than by position size or conviction level. It is a disciplined framework for managing a large portfolio of resource equities with widely varying risk profiles and time horizons.
Valuation at Multiple Commodity Price Scenarios
Rule teaches attendees at the Rule Classroom and Symposium to run net present value calculations at spot price, 25% below spot, and 25% above spot. The purpose is not to predict where the commodity will trade but to develop a range of outcomes that informs position sizing and entry price discipline. A company that is compelling at 25% below spot has a meaningful margin of safety; a company that only works at 25% above spot is a momentum bet.
Political Risk vs. Project Risk
Rule explicitly prefers political risk to project risk. A project in a difficult jurisdiction that works at the geology level can still generate outstanding returns if the political environment improves. A project in a stable jurisdiction that does not work at the geology level is simply a bad project. This bias is reflected in his current Canadian natural gas holdings -- he owns them because they are cheap enough to compensate for the political risk represented by the current policy environment, not because he expects near-term policy improvement.
Drill Success Uptake as a Contrarian Signal
Rule notes that two recent high-quality drill results -- the Moe copper-gold porphyry in Argentina's Vicuna district and the Aerys hole in Kazakhstan -- were met with surprisingly muted market response relative to the quality of the data. When professional capital fails to respond appropriately to genuinely compelling exploration results, it signals either broad sector fatigue or institutional under-allocation. For informed investors, this creates an opportunity window before the market reprices.
Macro Observations
Canada's Own Goal
Canada's technical recession in a period of elevated energy prices is, in Rule's view, a purely self-inflicted outcome. The country has exceptional natural resources, high educational attainment relative to the US, a world-class oil and gas technical workforce, and strong immigration quality. The underperformance is explained by fiscal disincentives, pipeline infrastructure failure, and a political class that has consistently misallocated these advantages. Brain drain to the US is the predictable result when high performers find they can advance faster and keep more of what they earn by relocating.
Why a Gold Standard Cannot Return
Politicians exist to exercise power. Their primary instruments of power are the ability to spend, allocate resources to allies, and mandate economic outcomes the private sector would not produce. A gold standard removes all three by imposing a binding constraint on money creation. Nixon abandoned gold convertability in 1971 precisely because it was preventing him from funding two wars simultaneously while pursuing re-election. The same incentive structure exists today, at far larger scale. No political class will voluntarily impose this constraint on itself.
Implementation
Audit Your Mental Model of the Market
Before any portfolio changes, identify whether you currently treat the market as a subject (a source of signals and verdicts) or a facility (a place to transact). If your behavior changes meaningfully in response to price movements in assets you have not re-analyzed fundamentally, you are treating it as a subject. The practical work is to develop enough conviction in your holdings that price movements stop functioning as information signals and start functioning as transactional opportunities.
Separate Your Savings Vehicle from Your Investing Activity
Decide what your savings are for: preserving purchasing power across time, not generating returns. Identify an asset you understand well enough to hold through decade-long flat periods without needing to sell. Gold is Rule's choice. Whatever your choice, establish clear rules for when you would draw on savings (only for dramatically more compelling opportunities, not for volatility management) and stick to them.
Run Valuations at Three Commodity Price Scenarios
For any resource equity position, run a net present value calculation at spot price, 25% below spot, and 25% above spot. Record the results. A position that is compelling only at or above spot carries more risk than one that works at 25% below spot. Use this range to calibrate position size and entry discipline. If you are not comfortable with the below-spot scenario, either reduce the position or deepen your analysis until you can form a view on it.
Classify Your Holdings by Capital Recovery Stage
Divide your resource portfolio into Rule's three tiers: core holdings (long-duration, high-quality anchors you intend to hold indefinitely), active holdings (positions where you have not yet recovered your capital and are actively monitoring), and passive holdings (positions where you have recovered all capital and hold a free carry). Manage each tier with different rules -- core holdings are nearly permanent, active holdings require ongoing work, and passive holdings need only monitoring.
Reassess Your Inflation Assumption
Calculate your own basket. Compare what you paid in 2020 for housing, food, insurance, energy, and healthcare against what you pay today. If your personal experience aligns more closely with Rule's 8-10% compounded estimate than with official CPI, adjust your real return calculations accordingly. This will change how you evaluate conventional savings vehicles -- bonds, GICs, and cash -- relative to hard assets.
Evaluate Political Risk Explicitly Before Project Risk
For any resource equity under consideration, assess the political risk first. Rule's preference for political over project risk means he is willing to hold assets in difficult jurisdictions if the geology is sound and the price reflects the risk. Understand whether the discount in a specific holding is geological (potentially permanent) or political (potentially reversible). Canadian natural gas is the current example: very cheap, policy-driven discount, held because the valuation more than compensates for the risk.
Monitor Industry Uptake on High-Quality Exploration Results
Rule flags the muted market response to two recent high-quality drill results as a contrarian signal. Develop a process for tracking significant exploration announcements and the subsequent institutional response. When genuinely compelling results are met with indifference or modest price movements, that is a potential entry window. This requires enough geological literacy to distinguish a strong drill result from a press release -- Rule explicitly notes this is not appropriate for all investors.
Use Liquidity Events to Systematically Add to Your Savings Position
Rule's silver sale -- converting 25% of proceeds into gold -- illustrates systematic savings behavior. Identify your own liquidity events: asset sales, distributions, revenue windfalls, rebalancing proceeds. Establish a rule for what percentage of those proceeds you convert into your savings vehicle. Remove the decision from discretionary judgment. The consistency of this behavior across market environments is what builds a meaningful savings base over decades.
Tools and Resources
Mentioned Resources
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Rule Investment Media | Rick Rule's primary content platform. Includes market commentary, interview archive, and the free portfolio ranking service where Rule personally ranks natural resource portfolios 1-10. |
| Rule Classroom | Educational platform for resource investing. Rule recommends the Introduction to Natural Resource Investing course as a prerequisite for the Symposium. Covers securities analysis fundamentals. |
| Rule Symposium 2026 -- Boca Raton | Annual resource investing conference, July 6-10, 2026. 70 vetted exhibitors, unconditional money-back guarantee, live and livestream options available. Discount code VA50 for $50 off. |
| David Lin Report -- Substack | David Lin's newsletter covering macroeconomics, markets, commodities, and investing interviews. |
| Gold Miners Bullish Percent Index ($BPGDM) | Sentiment indicator tracking the percentage of gold mining stocks on bullish Point & Figure chart signals. Hosted on StockCharts under the symbol $BPGDM. Readings below 30 indicate oversold conditions; the index fell to near zero in June 2026, one of its lowest readings on record, indicating extreme sector-wide pessimism. |
Suggested Resources
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Franco-Nevada Corporation | The gold royalty and streaming company Rule names as a core long-duration holding. Useful benchmark for understanding what a high-quality royalty structure looks like in practice. |
| WTF Happened in 1971 | Curated chart collection documenting divergences in economic data that began at or near the Nixon gold standard removal. Useful visual grounding for Rule's macro thesis on purchasing power erosion and the structural case for gold savings. |
| Shadow Government Statistics (ShadowStats) | Alternative inflation and economic data calculations by economist John Williams, using pre-revision BLS methodology. Aligns directionally with Rule's argument that official CPI substantially understates actual purchasing power erosion. Note: the site underwent a hosting disruption in mid-2025 and Williams now publishes primarily by subscriber email -- the public site may be intermittently unstable. |
| BLS -- CPI Methodology FAQ | Official explanation of what CPI measures and does not measure. Worth reading alongside Rule's critique to understand the definitional limitations of core CPI as a cost-of-living indicator. |
Source Material
[00:00]
the market as a whole falls dramatically. Uh what that means is that some of the fractional ownership in businesses otherwise known as shares in companies that I understand well enough to want to buy them falls. I'm not trying to make money on my savings. I'm trying to maintain the purchasing power. If I maintain uh both my sanity and my solvency, that's actually to my advantage, not to my disadvantage.
[00:30]
I'm very pleased to welcome back to the show Rick Rule, founder of Rule Investment Media, former CEO of Sprott. Rick, welcome back to the show. Good to see you again. And on the agenda today, we have gold, silver, miners, valuations of the markets in general, and some sage wisdom from you, legendary investor, on how to navigate this very tumultuous and volatile market. Good to see you again.
[01:00]
Well, David, it's a pleasure to be back with you. Before we begin, congratulations on the ongoing success of your channel. Well deserved. Certainly anticipated, but you deserve congratulations for it. At any rate, we'll also give a preview of the upcoming Rule Symposium and what investors can expect to learn by attending. It's a great show in Boca Raton, Florida.
[01:30]
Now the SpaceX IPO is blowing up as we speak. By blowing up, I mean it's going up, not down. $135 with the IPO price. It's at $175. This is now at well over $1.77 trillion. By comparison, Canada, where I'm based, has a GDP of $2.4 trillion Canadian. So we're looking at a company with almost the entire size of the entirety of Canada. Speaking of valuations, there's a story for you. I know you didn't participate in this particular stock offering. But this just comes to show that sometimes hype and hope beats overvaluation if people want to consider it overvalued. Your response?
[02:10]
Well, I told you offline, I received all of the stock that I applied for, which is to say none. It isn't that I thought it was overvalued or undervalued. I don't know how to value stocks like SpaceX. In my practice, money is made on the delta between price and value and price and expected value. Given that I had no idea what SpaceX is worth or what it might be worth, I decided not to participate. I guess it's emblematic of the fact that we've been in pretty benign markets since 1982. There are a lot of people who invest in a very different fashion. They invest based on their want for excitement. Or they invest based on where they think a stock is going rather than what a stock is worth. More power to them. I wish them every possible success. To the extent that they succeed, they may need to buy goods and services from me so that I can continue to prosper by buying stocks that are selling for less than what I think they're worth.
[03:12]
How do you navigate as an investor a market that is so concentrated within tech companies and large tech companies? And if SpaceX continues to rise, that lifts up all boats. But if the SpaceX company and Mag 7 companies at any point decide to miss expectations that could have the potential to bring down entire indices. Case in point Broadcom last Friday. What do you do?
[03:40]
David, most of your listeners I think believe that the market is a subject -- a source of information. I consider the market to be a facility, a place where I buy and sell fractional ownership of a business. To the extent that the market as a whole falls dramatically, what that means is that some of the fractional ownership in businesses otherwise known as shares in companies that I understand well enough to want to buy them falls. That circumstance delights me. It absolutely positively delights me. Despite the fact that I'm 73 years of age, well past my prime, closer to the end than to the beginning, I have a vicarious wish to become wealthier. In order to do that, I have to buy businesses that are selling for less than they're worth. So to the extent that there's a broad-based market decline, if I maintain both my sanity and my solvency, that's actually to my advantage, not to my disadvantage. I think the takeaway from this though is that many people regard the market as a subject and I regard the market as a facility. That means that my approach to investing and speculating is very different than most people's.
[05:04]
Shifting gears now. Iran oil tumbled about 4% this morning, down just 2% now. Trump called off air strikes on Iran yesterday as he said and announced that a deal is soon to be reached. Back in April when you were on the show, you had said that if the Iran war drags on, the economy could be in for much worse. Now that it looks like from the Trump administration announcement a deal is going to be made soon, is your outlook for economic growth rosier?
[05:30]
No, my outlook for the market in the near term might be rosier. Think David of a very good party or in this case a very bad party. It might be that collectively we stop drinking tonight at midnight. In other words, we don't get drunker. But the hangover is what follows. This war -- and I'm not talking about other countries or the lives lost -- has caused the American people a half a trillion dollars in direct expenditure, taking the forecast budget deficit in the United States from an annual basis of two trillion to 2.5 trillion. So I suspect that the economically damaging impacts of this conflagration will last longer. It will need to be financed. We are adding this bill to an already very large refinancing that will need to be accomplished over the next 18 months in the Treasury market. The fact that while all of the political forces in the country are attempting to jawbone down the short-term rate, the long-term rates are high -- tells you everything you need to know about the skepticism of private capital relative to US inflation and the purchasing power of the US dollar.
[07:10]
I suspect -- and by the way this is not the first time that Trump has reported substantial progress in peace -- that the suggestion that because he says so the conflict is over is not an assumption that's well supported by fact if you looked historically. But let's assume just for a second he is correct. The damage that has been done to the US economy in terms of expenditure and the damage that's been done to the global economy by higher energy prices -- which has the effect of a tax -- will take months and probably years to undo. The extent to which money that would otherwise have gone to other activities has gone to energy producers or energy companies exacerbates the credit quality cracks that were already appearing in global markets. The problems that you've seen in private credit are well documented. Lower liquidity, which is the consequence of higher energy prices, exacerbates that. I'm not suggesting that depression or recession is around the corner. I'm just suggesting that people's viewpoint -- that if the war were to end tomorrow we would never have to pay for it -- are naive at the very best.
[09:00]
[Host notes the gold miners bullish percent index sitting near seven -- one of the lowest readings on record despite gold near historic highs. Host flags this as a topic to be discussed with Rick later in the interview.]
[10:01]
Canada's economy shrunk by two consecutive quarters according to the latest GDP reports. Real GDP shrunk last quarter and the quarter before that. The Liberals are pointing fingers at the Conservatives and the Conservatives are blaming the Liberals under Carney. It seems to me that data reflects perhaps shrinking manufacturing and shrinking trade from the Canadian side. Some may say that's a symptom of tariffs. Can we extrapolate that to the rest of the Western world and say that Canada is a leading indicator for what's to come for anybody else that has experienced trade restrictions from tariffs?
[10:40]
No, I don't think so. Canada would love to blame their malaise on Trump. Now Americans can do that with a straight face. The truth is in Canadian parliament the Canadian difficulties is an own goal. I suspect that the phrase "elbows up" has everything to do with making your pockets easier to pick. Your leadership has done a spectacular job of that. The idea that Canada is experiencing weak growth in a period of very high energy prices is an astonishment. It took real skill to screw up a country as great as Canada. Great educational levels, great resource base, probably an undue reliance on one trading partner, the United States. The one thing that Carney is doing right, I think, is trying to deepen his or your relationship with other countries. But the attempt by the Canadian political class to blame somebody other than the Canadian political class for the malaise in the Canadian economy is stupid.
[12:08]
You have had much more intelligent immigration programs than the United States has. Your median educational levels are higher than America's median educational levels. You have the ability to be a major energy exporter despite your former prime minister not understanding the business case for Canadian oil and gas when all of your trading partners were screaming for it. Canada's performance is really truly an own goal. Now the really good news about that is that that is easily easily correctable. Your political class needs to understand simple arithmetic and less narrative. One would hope that despite the fact that your prime minister is anti-carbon, his financial background means that he will understand that the money to pay for his spending has to come from somewhere and energy is the easiest source for it to come from. Canada being one of the richest countries in the world by natural resources is also in a technical recession. How does that make sense?
[14:00]
It doesn't. As I say, that's an own goal. Now part of it -- had Mr. Trudeau understood 10 years ago that there was in fact a business case for Canadian oil and gas -- your markets would have been diversified and you would have built enough infrastructure that your energy business could sustain the malaise in the rest of your economy. That didn't happen. Canada punches above its weight privately in a whole bunch of sectors including technology sectors. The difficulty is perverse incentives. To the extent that young Canadians excel, the temptation for them to move to a part of the world where they can advance faster and keep more of what they earn -- which is to say the United States -- is overwhelming. Canada has done an absolutely spectacular job nurturing intellectual capital and then involuntarily exporting it. If you changed your fiscal and other policies, Canada would be able to capitalize on its own human resources at the same time that it capitalized on its natural resources.
[17:48]
I think if you look at the S&P and you try to adjust it for purchasing power -- if you looked at the S&P in gold terms, the performance of the S&P since the year 2000 has not been all that good. If your earnings increase at 5% a year but the purchasing power of your earnings decreases by 7 or 8% a year, despite the fact that on paper the 5% gain looks good, you end up being in terms of purchasing power 3 or 4% annually worse off. So my suggestion is that if you look at the purchasing power expressed by a unit of the S&P 500 in the period 2000 to 2026, the picture looks substantially less rosy. One must look at both the numerator and the denominator in any mathematical equation.
[19:00]
I save mostly in gold. I maintain liquidity in US dollars and occasionally in Canadian dollars. And when I look at the basket of goods and services that I acquire today in the context of my savings in the context of gold, I'm struck by how cheap real estate is. I'm struck by how cheap healthcare is. I'm struck by how cheap food is. I'm struck by how cheap energy is. When I started saving in gold, gold was $250 or $260 an ounce. And if I measure the S&P performance since the year 2000 versus gold's performance since the year 2000, then the increase in the S&P doesn't seem that attractive. Nor frankly does the increase in the gold price.
[21:06]
Gold is a constant really. With me, David, it isn't theoretical. It's actual. I did hold gold during that period. I bought gold continually during that time. The last time I sold gold was in 2009 and I didn't sell gold in 2009 as a consequence of the fact that I thought the price was going down. I bought it because I owned it as liquidity and there were other asset classes that were cheaper. Occasionally one dips into one's savings to acquire assets that will increase their material standard of living. After the equities market collapse of 2008 and the credit market collapse of 2008, in 2009 there were a variety of financial assets that were on sale at such ridiculously cheap prices that they caused me to liquidate a bunch of my gold to buy, albeit temporarily, asset classes that were cheaper. For me savings are just exactly that. I'm not trying to make money on my savings. I'm trying to maintain the purchasing power of my savings. I make money investing, which is different than saving. I save and maintain my purchasing power in gold. Unless we have another 2008 style psychotic break in the market, I imagine personally, David, that the sell decision with regards to my bullion will be made by my estate, not by me.
[23:00]
Are you adding more to your savings now that gold has fallen to $4,000? I am. I'm a systematic saver in gold, and I'm not particularly price sensitive. The only thing that causes me to sell my gold are opportunities that I find dramatically more compelling. When a circumstance occurs that adds substantially to my private liquidity, I use part of that money to buy gold. As an example, in January of this year, as a consequence of a hyperbolic up move in silver, I sold 80% of my physical silver. That was a speculation. I used 25% of the proceeds to add to my savings, which is to say I bought physical gold. I also added some very short-term treasuries. I think I'll make a reasonable sum of money on next month's natural resources investment symposium. A substantial amount of the money that's left over after I pay all expenses, I will use to buy physical gold.
[25:11]
[Host introduces the gold miners bullish percent index, noting it sits at a multi-year low near zero on a 0-to-100 scale. GDX has fallen about 37% from its peak earlier in 2026. Host asks about expected mood at the Rule Symposium given extreme bearishness.]
[25:45]
David, I think you need to understand the intellectual complexion of my crowd and the history of the conference. You asking my attendees how they feel about gold is sort of like going into an evangelical church in the American South and asking the choir if they believe in God. The attendees at my conference for the last few years have had singularly good experience and I suspect that the job will be to temper as opposed to create enthusiasm for both precious metals and natural resource assets. The discussion about the fact that I consider the market to be a facility as opposed to a subject is something that we've taught for a very long time. Many of the veteran members of the conference will ascribe to the belief that money is made on the delta between price and value. And to the extent that the price of an asset class or the price of a company falls relative to its value, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. So I would expect that the mood at my conference will be informed ebullience.
[28:18]
Gold peaked around $5,500 when I saw you in Vancouver in late January. It's now at $4,200. That is an extraordinary move in a few months. Gold seems to be repeating what looks like 2011 all over again -- a double top, correction, and then capitulation. Can you comment on this price movement?
[28:50]
With the caveat that my own life is driven fundamentally as opposed to technically, I would suggest that the recent softness in the gold price has to do with three factors. The most important of which is higher US nominal interest rates. Higher interest rates increase the attractiveness of the US dollar and are tough on the prices of US dollar denominated assets. They also correlate reasonably well with fears of a recessionary or deflationary recession. And I think that people are concerned about the possibility of a credit collapse and a recessionary circumstance derailing inflation. I think that most of those fears are misguided. I can't tell you where the gold price will go in the near term. Nobody can although many people will try.
[30:01]
But I can tell you that the period that we are going through currently reminds me personally of no circumstance as much as 1975. The period 1970 to 1975 was characterized by an increasing fear of inflation in the population and an increase in the gold price from an admittedly price-controlled $35 an ounce to a high of about $200 an ounce. The political fears around inflation caused the US Congress to do something fairly unusual. They decided to do something about it and they allowed interest rates to rise. And that increase in interest rates cratered the price of gold from about $200 to about $100. It cratered some other things too -- the US bond market, the US equities market, durable good sales, new home construction.
[31:30]
And after a fairly brief period of time, Congress and the American political class in fact the voting class lost its nerve and abandoned any pretense in defending the sanctity of the US dollar when interest rates were forced down. It became clear to savers and investors around the world not just in the United States that political expediency was more important than the sanctity of the dollar. And after that happened, after the interest rates were engineered down, the gold price exploded from a low of about $100 an ounce to a high of about $850 an ounce. It took two things, very high real gold prices and then a tripling of the US interest rate under Volcker to finally break the price of gold in 1981. Gold then had to compete with a US treasury selling at 15%. We're a long long long way from there.
[33:00]
By the way, David, I am not suggesting that anybody have 100% of their net worth in gold or SpaceX or anything else. The future is a set of probabilities. There's no certainty whatsoever. But I would suggest that for the American investing public at least, the market share of gold and gold related securities relative to other savings and investment asset classes is one half of 1%, down from a four decade mean of 2%. I believe that we will over the next 10 years experience at least a reversion to mean. I also believe that the subject of inflation in the United States and Canada is dominated by an indicator, the CPI, which I believe to be false. The CPI when it's inconvenient doesn't include food or fuel, which makes it of very little interest to somebody who drives and eats.
[35:01]
It's silly as a cost of living index. I would suggest that if your listeners looked at the basket of goods and services that's necessary for their life and they contrasted the price levels that they paid in 2020 with the price levels that they pay now, the deterioration in the purchasing power of their dollars -- be it Canadian or US -- would be closer to 8 or 10% compounded than it is to the more recently restated US CPI high of 3.9. If you believe, as I believe, that the debt and deficits that we face in the United States and Canada will increase rather than decrease over time, the funding mechanism -- the only funding mechanism that seems to me to be available -- is artificially low interest rates to lower the interest component on the debt and quantitative easing. If that's true, the easiest beneficiary of that to access in your accounts is gold and gold stocks. Should you be all-in? No. This isn't a certainty. Should you have one half of 1% of your savings in an asset class that has historically protected you against a circumstance that I think is a probability rather than a possibility? Yes.
[37:00]
[Host raises Nixon's 1971 gold standard removal and asks why it happened. Official White House position was the need to preserve monetary stability by suspending convertibility at $35 per ounce while gold traded freely at $42-43 in European markets. Countries could exchange dollar holdings for gold at $35 and sell immediately at $42, a riskless arbitrage.]
[37:40]
The French called the US dollar's status as the world's reserve currency the exorbitant privilege. It allowed the United States to export its inflation. It allowed us to live beyond our means. And when gold was trading freely at $42 and countries could exchange their claims -- their overseas holdings of US dollars -- for gold at $35 and sell it for $42 overnight, riskless, the temptation to do that was too high. President Nixon had a war to fight -- two wars actually, the war on poverty which we lost, and the war in Vietnam which we lost. He had two wars going on simultaneously plus a third war, re-election, to consider. The idea that he should end the exorbitant privilege that we enjoyed by printing away the difference between what we consumed and what we produced was too great a cost to him politically to bear.
[38:44]
Several prominent investors including Ray Dalio have been floating the idea of returning to a gold standard. If we look at why it was removed in the first place, do you not think that this is impossible in today's environment?
[39:00]
Completely impossible. Politicians exist to exercise power. There's no other reason why they would subject their family and themselves to what they have to go through. Their currency is power. Gold reduces that power. The power to allocate to your friends, the power to spend, the power to mandate circumstances that the economy wouldn't otherwise allow is what politicians live for. The discipline that would be imposed on politicians by the gold standard makes it completely implausible that they would embrace it. Why would anybody choose to become a eunuch? To the extent that politicians imposed a gold standard on themselves, they would become financial eunuchs.
[39:59]
Going back to valuations in the markets, which do you think has a better outlook right now based on current valuations -- gold miners or natural gas and oil stocks? That's a very very very tough question. With regards to international oils, they're nowhere near as cheap as they were the last time you and I talked. In January, the war changed that. Canadian natural gas, however, is still very cheap. It's cheap because of the headwinds represented by your political class, the Laurentian elite, in particular Carney. And I don't know how that's going to end. I own them. They're so cheap that I'm willing to take the risks.
[40:40]
Certain gold stocks -- the extraordinarily high quality companies, the Wheatons, the Franco-Nevadas, the Agnico Eagles -- if you believe in my decadal long thesis, are not cheap but they're reasonably priced. Coming below them, the single asset producers and some of the developers of very large 5 million ounce-plus deposits particularly those which are located reasonably adjacent to existing infrastructure are cheap by historic metrics. Truly cheap by historic metrics. The other thing that's starting to become attractive are the already successful drill hole plays. We've seen two drill holes in the last four weeks -- the Moe drill hole into a copper-gold porphyry in the Vicuna district in northern Argentina, a truly spectacular drill hole, and then the Aerys drill hole in Kazakhstan. The market's uptake for high-quality exploration that has enjoyed successful efforts is low. And that is very welcome.
[43:08]
Basically, you're not selling your oil holdings yet. No. The oil industry on a global basis was underinvesting in sustaining capital to the tune of a billion dollars a day and that would lead to higher prices by 2029, 2030. They're underinvesting by more than a billion dollars a day. Can you imagine how much sustaining capital right now the UAE or Saudi or Iran is spending? In addition to the under-spending on sustaining capital, we need to rebuild all the stuff we're blowing up right now. That means that the prices that we're paying today are likely to be with us in 2029 or 2030. It wouldn't surprise me in 2027 or 2028 to see the prices go down. But no, my oil stocks are not for sale. I don't live in two-year periods.
[44:41]
Let's talk about the Rule Symposium, July 6th through 10th. You have personally picked the companies that will be attending. Most of them you've said publicly that you have invested in. How have you picked these companies?
[45:00]
They have to inhabit my accounts, which is to say I have to own them. I have a fairly large number of companies in my accounts, which I divide into three holdings: core holdings, the Franco, the Agnico Eagles, the Wheatons of the world; active holdings, which are companies that I own that I haven't recaptured my capital from; and what I call passive holdings -- companies that I hold in my portfolio and I monitor but I've sold enough that I no longer have any capital at risk. Every company that will be exhibiting at this conference is owned in my own accounts. We turned down over 130 companies who applied to exhibit this year because they weren't owned in our accounts. That isn't to say they were bad companies, but we didn't know them well enough that they inhabited our accounts.
[47:20]
I am interested in the delta between price and value and price and expected value. In other words, I buy stocks the way other people buy physical goods. If I need a coat and a coat is on sale and it's a good coat at a good price, I'll likely buy it. Importantly for the smaller companies, a lot of the value is intangible. It's in the form of people and their track record and their reliability and their knowledge. We rank companies on the delta between what they're selling for today and what we think they're worth today, and then what we think they'll be worth two years from now and five years from now. This is probabilistic work, not certain work. We shade companies based on the quality of their management and the size of the prize. We are typically much more oriented towards taking political risk as an example than project risk.
[49:00]
People can access this for themselves. Anyone who wishes to can go to the Rule Investment Media website, list their natural resource stocks portfolio and I will personally and for free rank those companies 1 to 10, one being best, 10 being worst. I should also say for the 70 exhibitors at the conference -- whether or not you attend the conference -- you can go to the Rule Investment Media YouTube website and I have interviewed all 70 companies. Those videos are posted on YouTube. The purpose is that people can show up at my conference already prepared to allocate their time at the conference more efficiently.
[50:38]
Last year's conference in July 2025 saw gold at $3,400 roughly. It's now climbed to $4,200 today -- up 30%. Silver has almost doubled since last July. Copper is at all-time highs and oil is at the highest it's been since before 2022. What will the key themes of this year be given that most commodities have soared to new highs?
[51:10]
I think it'll be less commodity focused although there will be some big picture discussion -- including a discussion about the historic underinvestment of the means of production around copper, and Robert Friedland's assertion that we will need to mine more copper in the next 20 years than we've mined in all of human history. But our discussions will be much more around individual issues and how to do valuations. We teach people at the Rule Classroom to run net present value calculations at spot, at 25% below spot, and a 25% premium to spot. Not knowing necessarily what the future holds, but apprising yourself of a variety of circumstances so that you can make a calculation with somewhat more accuracy. We're adding oil and gas back into the curriculum this year, expanding it. And the money-back guarantee has been in place for 30-plus years across a range of educational products, with less than one-tenth of 1% of tuitions ever refunded. If you at your sole discretion believe that you didn't get your money's worth, we give you your money back.
[54:31]
I want to end the conversation on productivity. If you scale the successes of an individual business to a nation like Canada or even the United States, is that possible? Businesses must convince their customers that their goods and services are worth more to the customer than the money. Governments do not need to convince. They need to coerce. Governments extract your resources from the threat of violence or the utilization of fraud. The people who are drawn to a business where they must convince their customers are very different than the people who are drawn to a business where you can coerce your customers. The only way that I can think of that the prosperity that is a consequence of private enterprise can occur in a society is a society that encourages private enterprise at the expense of public coercion -- a larger private sector and a smaller public sector.
AI Prompt
AI Implementation Prompt
CONTEXT This prompt is based on a June 2026 interview between Rick Rule -- founder of Rule Investment Media, former CEO of Sprott, and one of the most experienced resource sector investors alive -- and David Lin of the David Lin Report. Rick Rule has been investing in natural resources for over five decades. The interview covers gold's recent pullback from $5,500 to $4,200, the gold miners bullish percent index near seven (extreme pessimism), the macro backdrop including US deficit expansion driven by the Iran war, Canada's self-inflicted recession, inflation mismeasurement, and Rule's current portfolio positioning across gold miners, Canadian natural gas, and energy equities. Rule's core investment philosophy is built on the delta between price and value. He does not use technical analysis or react to market sentiment. He treats the market as a facility for transacting -- not a subject that communicates information about the worth of assets. He separates his financial activity into saving (gold, to preserve purchasing power) and investing (resource equities and businesses, to generate returns). His current portfolio actions include: continued systematic gold buying funded by silver proceeds and upcoming conference revenue; holding Canadian natural gas and oil positions through political and price headwinds; identifying single-asset gold producers and large-deposit developers as historically cheap; and flagging muted market response to high-quality drill results as a contrarian opportunity signal. His macro thesis rests on three pillars: (1) US and Canadian deficits are structurally unreducible and will be funded via artificially low rates and quantitative easing, which benefits gold; (2) the current gold correction mirrors the 1975 episode when political resolve to defend the dollar broke within a brief period and gold subsequently ran from $100 to $850; (3) official CPI understates actual purchasing power erosion by 4-6 percentage points compounded, making the real return on conventional savings vehicles negative and the case for gold savings structural, not speculative. KEY PRINCIPLES 1. The market is a facility, not a subject. Price movements in assets you understand are transactional events, not informational signals. Falling prices in well-analyzed businesses are opportunities, not warnings. 2. Money is made on the delta between price and value. Buy when price is below your estimate of intrinsic or expected future value. Sell when the gap closes or reverses. Everything else is noise. 3. Saving and investing are different activities with different rules. Gold is savings -- its purpose is to preserve purchasing power across generational time horizons. Resource equities are investments -- their purpose is to generate returns by exploiting price-versus-value discrepancies. 4. Political resolve to defend purchasing power is temporary. Historical evidence -- 1975 is the operative parallel -- shows that political classes consistently abandon tight money when the cost becomes acute. The mechanism that corrects gold is the same mechanism that eventually drives it far higher. 5. CPI is a political construct, not a cost-of-living measure. Actual purchasing power erosion since 2020 is estimated at 8-10% compounded. Investment frameworks built on official inflation data will consistently underestimate the case for hard assets. 6. Political risk is preferable to project risk. Assets with geological validity but political headwinds can recover when policy changes. Assets with no geological validity cannot. 7. Extreme sentiment lows are historically associated with contrarian opportunity. A gold miners bullish percent index near seven, in the context of an intact commodity thesis, is a setup for disciplined buyers -- not a confirmation of thesis failure. 8. Deficit monetization is the path of least resistance. With gold at 0.5% market share against a four-decade mean of 2%, a reversion to mean alone -- without any overshoot -- represents a meaningful structural tailwind. 9. Intangible value in small resource companies is the primary source of mispricing. Management track record, geological knowledge, and operational reliability are hard to quantify but drive real outcomes. They are systematically underweighted by the market. 10. Never hold more than you understand. Rule received no SpaceX allocation intentionally -- he cannot value it. Position sizing should reflect confidence in your own analysis, not conviction borrowed from others. KEY LEVERS Valuation rigor -- running net present value at spot, 25% below spot, and 25% above spot to establish a margin of safety and range of outcomes. Capital recovery classification -- organizing holdings into core, active, and passive tiers based on whether original capital has been returned, enabling different management rules for each tier. Savings discipline -- systematic conversion of liquidity events into the savings vehicle of choice (gold for Rule), non-price-sensitive, consistent. Sentiment as a contrarian input -- monitoring industry-wide sentiment indicators (gold miners bullish percent index) and professional capital response to drill results as signals of opportunity, not direction. Political versus project risk assessment -- explicit evaluation of whether a discount is geological (permanent) or political (potentially reversible) before position sizing. WHAT THIS IS NOT This is not a momentum or technical framework. Rule explicitly dismisses price charts and stock momentum as inputs to his decisions. This is not a prediction framework for near-term gold price direction. Rule acknowledges he cannot predict where gold goes in the next quarter. This is not a recommendation to be concentrated in gold. He advocates for a meaningful allocation -- not all-in. He owns a diversified resource portfolio alongside his gold savings. This is not applicable to businesses he cannot value. SpaceX is the explicit example. The framework only works when you have done sufficient analytical work to form a genuine view on value. This is not passive index investing dressed up differently. Rule actively selects, ranks, and monitors individual resource equities based on his own analysis and personal ownership. IMPLEMENTATION MODES Apply -- Help me apply Rule's delta-between-price-and-value framework to a specific resource equity or asset class I am evaluating. Portfolio Audit -- Help me classify my existing resource holdings into core, active, and passive tiers based on capital recovery stage and conviction level. Valuation Build -- Help me construct a net present value model at spot, minus 25%, and plus 25% for a specific company or commodity position. Macro Framing -- Help me understand how the current macro environment (deficits, interest rates, inflation mismeasurement) maps to Rule's historical parallels and what that implies for position sizing. Sentiment Analysis -- Help me assess whether current sentiment indicators in a specific sector or asset class resemble the contrarian setups Rule describes as historically actionable. Risk Classification -- Help me determine whether the discount I'm seeing in a specific holding reflects political risk (potentially reversible) or project risk (structural), and how to size the position accordingly. Savings Architecture -- Help me design a savings framework -- vehicle, contribution triggers, and sell rules -- modeled on Rule's gold savings approach. Decision Support -- I am facing a specific portfolio decision. Help me think through it using Rule's principles: what does the delta between price and value suggest? What are the three commodity price scenarios? What is the political versus project risk breakdown? Content Development -- Help me develop content (article, report, video script, presentation) based on Rule's frameworks for an investing audience. Research Expansion -- Help me identify additional resources, historical data, or analytical frameworks that extend and complement the ideas Rule covers in this interview. AI OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS Stay grounded in the frameworks and principles from this interview. Do not default to generic investment advice or academic finance theory unless it directly supports or extends Rule's specific arguments. Focus on practical implementation. When helping with portfolio decisions, valuation work, or positioning, ask clarifying questions before prescribing. The right answer depends on the specific situation. Challenge weak assumptions. If a position is being held for sentimental reasons, or a sell decision is being driven by price action rather than fundamental change, name it. Draw connections where useful. Rule's 1975 parallel, his CPI critique, his Canadian natural gas thesis, and his drill result observation all connect to the same underlying argument about price versus value and political versus structural risk. Do not confuse saving and investing. If someone describes gold as a trade, correct the framing. If someone describes a resource equity as a savings vehicle, identify the category error. Ask clarifying questions when needed. Before providing valuation support or portfolio guidance, confirm: what is the commodity, what is the stage of the company, what is the jurisdiction, and what is the current price relative to the person's estimate of value. GUIDED DISCOVERY Ask me up to three questions, one at a time, to determine: (1) what I am trying to accomplish -- whether that is portfolio evaluation, a specific investment decision, macro framework development, or something else; (2) which of Rule's ideas from this interview are most relevant to my current situation; (3) how these concepts could be applied most effectively given my constraints, knowledge level, and objectives. Once you understand my situation, help me build a practical implementation plan.