Overview
Steve Barton of In it to Win it interviews veteran natural resource investor Rick Rule days after a sharp pullback across gold, silver, and oil. Rule opens with the headline claim: measured against net present value with production sold at today's spot price, gold mining stocks are the cheapest he has seen in 40 years. He does not rule out further declines, but he does not care. As a structural gold buyer with a ten-year horizon, lower prices work in his favor, and sometimes assets are simply cheap enough to act on.
Rule contrasts his approach with technical analysis throughout the conversation. His entire process is the delta between price and value, built on net present value and net asset value work. He concedes his timing is usually poor, but argues that a value-based entry means the exit takes care of itself. His silver trade illustrates the method: he entered around $25 as a speculation on a hated asset, sold into the hyperbolic run toward $120, and took what he calls a fat slug out of the middle rather than trying to top-tick the move.
On silver going forward, Rule draws a sharp line between saving and speculating. He saves in gold, buying consistently regardless of the chart, and speculates in silver. Because silver mining equities are priced at a discount to today's silver price, they should outperform if silver trades sideways and decline less if it falls, so his speculative silver exposure now runs through the equities rather than the metal.
The energy discussion carries the strongest forward view. Rule expects oil to stay relatively weak through 2026 as post-conflict supply resumes and high prices destroy demand in low-income economies. But he argues the industry, particularly state-controlled producers, has underinvested in sustaining capital by roughly a billion dollars a day for years, and the recent conflict destroyed capital goods that must be replaced. The result, in his view, is rationing by price in 2029 or 2030. He frames the coming summer weakness in oil equities as a potential once-in-a-decade entry, expects ExxonMobil to retest the $100 area, and holds Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Transocean as his entire oil services portfolio.
The interview closes with an extended preview of the Rule Symposium: 30 years of iteration, macro speakers who are operators rather than journalists, exhibitors vetted by ownership, a year of recorded content, and a money-back guarantee that has been claimed by less than one tenth of one percent of attendees.
Why This Matters
This conversation is a compact statement of a durable investment philosophy applied to a live market moment. The specific prices will age, but the framework will not: define whether you are a saver or a speculator in each asset, value businesses against net present value at conservative prices, buy at meaningful discounts, add at bigger discounts, and let the entry do the work of the exit. Rule's refusal to engage with chart-based questions is itself instructive; he treats every technical prompt as an opportunity to restate the price-versus-value discipline.
The sustaining capital thesis is the most valuable piece of forward intelligence here. Rule's argument that a billion dollars a day of deferred investment by state oil producers guarantees a supply problem around 2029 or 2030 is a testable, dated claim with clear portfolio implications: accumulate high-quality oil producers and services companies into weakness, on a three-to-five-year horizon, while the market extrapolates recent price action. It also connects directly to resource sector work in Western Canada, where energy capital cycles drive land, exploration, and service activity.
The silver equities logic is a reusable relative-value template. When equities discount lower commodity prices than spot, the equities offer asymmetric exposure in flat, rising, and even falling price scenarios. That structure recurs across resource sectors and is worth keeping as a standing analytical pattern, not a one-time trade idea.
Key Points
- Valued against net present value with production sold at today's spot price, gold mining stocks are the cheapest Rule has seen in 40 years. They could get cheaper, but sometimes assets are simply cheap enough to buy.
- Rule is a structural gold buyer on a ten-year horizon. He would not sell if gold rose $1,000 and would buy heavily if it fell $1,000, so lower prices work in his favor.
- He ignores technical analysis entirely. His process is the delta between price and value, and a value-based entry means the exit takes care of itself even when timing is poor.
- Hyperbolic price moves almost always reconcile downward. The backside of a hockey stick chart is as steep as the front side, so a parabolic chart in an owned asset is a sell signal for him.
- His silver trade entered around $25, was sold into the run toward $120, and captured a large slice of the middle. He cites Bernard Baruch: anyone claiming to buy exact bottoms and sell exact tops is lying.
- Rule saves in gold and speculates in silver. Because silver equities are priced at a discount to today's silver price, they should outperform sideways silver and fall less than a declining silver price, so his speculation now runs through the equities.
- Oil should stay relatively weak through 2026. The conflict-driven price spike caused demand destruction in low-income economies, and supply is resuming while floating inventory and strategic reserves prevented an actual shortage.
- State-controlled oil producers have underinvested in sustaining capital by roughly a billion dollars a day for years, and wartime destruction of capital goods adds to the deficit. Rule expects rationing by price in 2029 or 2030 as a result.
- He frames the coming summer weakness in oil equities as a potential once-in-a-decade buying opportunity and expects ExxonMobil to retest the $100 area, a very different proposition than buying it at $180.
- His entire oil services portfolio is Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Transocean. After 40 years of limited success picking leveraged services plays, he simply owns the best of the best and expects them to profit heavily from the rebuild and catch-up spending of the early 2030s.
- Strait of Hormuz risk is structural, not episodic. He views the Sunni-Shia and Iran-Israel conflicts as existential for the participants, expects insurance premiums rather than crew wages to be the real bottleneck, and anticipates Saudi Yanbu pipeline upgrades and expanded UAE bypass capacity.
- The Rule Symposium's differentiators: macro speakers who are operators rather than journalists, exhibitors vetted by actual ownership, twelve months of programming around a four-day event, full recordings, and a money-back guarantee refunded to less than one tenth of one percent of attendees over 30 years.
Quotable
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Rick Rule
"Gold stocks, the way I value them against their net present value, assuming that their production is sold at today's spot price, are as cheap as I've seen them in 40 years. It wouldn't surprise me to see them get cheaper, but I don't care. Sometimes stuff is cheap enough."
Why it works: the headline claim of the interview, delivered with the two qualifiers that make it credible: a defined valuation method and an admission that prices may fall further.
Rick Rule
"One of the advantages of having been in markets for 50 years is, you know, I do them for money, not for excitement."
Why it works: a one-line separation of process from entertainment that reframes the entire pullback discussion before any price is mentioned.
Rick Rule
"My life is all about the delta between price and value."
Why it works: the whole philosophy in ten words, and his standing answer to every technical analysis question in the interview.
Rick Rule
"The backside of a hockey stick is just as steep as the front side, just a lot less fun."
Why it works: a vivid, memorable rule of thumb about parabolic charts that explains his silver sale without any pretense of top-calling.
Rick Rule
"There's a lot of people that tell you about 90-day triples. It's just that not many people experience them."
Why it works: dry skepticism about trading folklore, used to defend a five-year holding period that actually paid.
Rick Rule
"The underinvestment that we're making now as a species worldwide in sustaining capital investment will result in lower producing capabilities absolutely positively without fail unless we pick up our spending, which we aren't going to do."
Why it works: the core of the oil thesis stated with unusual certainty, tied to a specific, testable 2029-2030 window.
Concepts
Core Frameworks
Structural Buyer vs Trader
A structural buyer holds a multi-year conviction about where an asset's price will be and accumulates on a schedule that welcomes weakness. Rule believes gold will be materially higher in nominal terms in ten years, so a $1,000 drop makes him a big buyer while a $1,000 rise would not make him a seller. The identity matters because it determines how you should feel about a pullback: for a trader it is a loss, for a structural buyer it is improved terms. Deciding which one you are, per asset, before the volatility arrives is the discipline.
The Price-Value Delta
Rule's entire process is the gap between what a business trades for and what its net present value and net asset value work says it is worth. He concedes that ignoring technical analysis makes his timing lousy, but argues that when the entry is grounded in value, the exit takes care of itself over time. The framework also budgets his attention: fundamental valuation consumes all of his working hours, so he outsources chart reading to people who specialize in it rather than pretending to do both.
NPV at Spot as the Miner Valuation Standard
The 40-year cheapness claim rests on a specific method: value each producer's future production as if it were all sold at today's spot price, discount it to net present value, and compare that to the market price. Using spot rather than optimistic forward assumptions strips promotional upside out of the math. When companies still screen historically cheap under that conservative treatment, margin expansion from any higher price becomes free optionality rather than a required assumption.
Strategies
Save in Gold, Speculate in Silver
Rule separates his precious metals exposure by function. Gold is savings: he buys consistently, almost irrespective of the chart, as long-duration insurance. Silver is speculation: he bought it around $25 because it was hated, expecting a rerating when sentiment normalized, and sold when the move went hyperbolic instead. Keeping the two functions in separate mental accounts prevents the most common precious metals error, which is treating a speculation like savings after it falls or treating savings like a trade after it rises.
Silver Equities as Discounted Exposure
Silver mining stocks are currently priced at a discount to what today's silver price implies they are worth. That structure creates favorable asymmetry across scenarios: if silver rises, the equities should rise; if silver trades sideways, the equities should outperform the metal as the discount closes; and if silver falls, the equities should fall less because their valuations already discount lower prices. Rule therefore expresses his speculative silver view through the equities rather than the metal. The pattern is portable to any resource sector where equities lag the commodity.
The Fat Slug Out of the Middle
Rule does not attempt to buy bottoms or sell tops, quoting Bernard Baruch's line that anyone claiming to do both is a liar. Instead he buys at roughly a 25 percent discount to his estimate of value, buys more at a 50 percent discount, and sells into strength without needing the peak. His silver trade, entered near $25 and sold well below the $120 high, still captured a multiple of his capital. The target is the large middle section of a move, which is achievable, rather than the endpoints, which are not.
Best of the Best in Hard Sectors
After 40 years of limited success picking leveraged oil services plays, Rule's answer is to stop trying to be clever in a sector he cannot handicap: his entire services portfolio is Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Transocean. When a macro thesis is strong but security selection within it is difficult, owning the highest-quality names captures most of the thesis with the least analytical risk. He applies the same logic to producers, noting there is no need to go far down the quality trail when the best of the best trades at a substantial discount to net asset value.
Macro Observations
The Sustaining Capital Deficit
Oil production declines without continuous reinvestment, and Rule argues the industry, particularly state-controlled producers in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, and the UAE, has underspent on sustaining capital by roughly a billion dollars a day for years. Wartime destruction of capital goods deepens the hole, and conflict diverts state budgets further from reinvestment. Because the resulting production decline is mechanical rather than speculative, Rule expects rationing by price in 2029 or 2030 and treats the current price weakness as the accumulation window before that arrives.
Demand Destruction from Price Spikes
The conflict-era price spike was anticipatory rather than a true shortage: floating inventory and strategic reserves in the US, China, and Japan kept product flowing, and some cargos loaded at $110 unloaded at $140. But the high prices priced low-income economies out of the market, and Rule expects that demand destruction to suppress consumption for as much as six months. Combined with resuming supply, that supports his call for a relatively weak oil price through 2026 even while the long-term supply picture tightens.
Hormuz Risk Is Structural
Rule treats the Strait of Hormuz disruption as a recurring feature, not a resolved event, because he views the underlying Sunni-Shia rivalry and the Iran-Israel conflict as existential for the participants. The practical bottleneck for tanker traffic is insurance premiums rather than crew willingness, since wages are a tiny share of transport costs, and sovereigns are already subsidizing premiums, shifting risk from tanker owners to taxpayers. He expects durable workarounds: Saudi upgrades to the Yanbu pipeline capable of moving up to seven million barrels a day to the Red Sea, and expanded UAE pipeline capacity exiting through Oman.
Hyperbolic Moves Reconcile
When a chart goes vertical, the shape itself becomes information. Rule's observation is that hyperbolic advances almost always reconcile downward, and the descent is as steep as the ascent. He therefore sells into parabolic strength in assets he owns and looks to buy after hyperbolic declines in asset classes he wants. This is the one place he willingly reads a chart, because the pattern describes crowd behavior rather than predicting price targets.
Warnings
Markets Extrapolate the Recent Past
Rule expects oil equities to sell off this summer because investors will look at three months of falling prices and project them forward, ignoring the production decline already locked in for 2029 and beyond. The general lesson is that charts encode the recent past, not deferred capital spending, and the gap between the two is where multi-year opportunity lives for anyone whose time frame, as he puts it, is not limited to a long weekend.
Players, Not Journalists
Rule's standard for macro commentary is operational experience inside the institutions being discussed: Jim Rickards on Wall Street fragility as former general counsel of Long-Term Capital Management, David Stockman on shrinking government as Reagan's budget director, Nomi Prins on Wall Street as a former Goldman Sachs partner, Danielle DiMartino Booth on the Fed as a former Dallas Fed researcher. The filter is worth applying to any information diet: weight sources by whether the speaker has operated inside the system they are describing, and discount narration from the sidelines.
Implementation
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Classify Each Position: Savings or Speculation
Go through current resource holdings and label each one the way Rule labels gold (savings, bought consistently, held through volatility) or silver (speculation, bought on hatred, sold on euphoria). Write the label down before the next big move so the position's role, not the price action, dictates the response to a rally or a drawdown.
Value Miners Against NPV at Spot
Adopt Rule's conservative test for any producer under consideration: estimate net present value assuming all production is sold at today's spot price, with no forward price optimism. Compare that figure to the market capitalization. Companies that are cheap under this treatment carry higher prices as free upside rather than a required assumption.
Stage Buys at Defined Discounts
Replace bottom-picking with Rule's laddered structure: begin buying at roughly a 25 percent discount to estimated value and add at a 50 percent discount. Accept in advance that entries will look early and exits will look premature. The objective is the fat middle of the move, not the endpoints.
Express Silver Views Through Equities
If holding a speculative silver thesis, check whether the mining equities are discounting a lower silver price than spot, as Rule says they are now. Where that discount exists, the equities offer better asymmetry than the metal across flat, rising, and falling scenarios. Reassess whenever the equities rerate to parity with the metal.
Build an Oil Equity Watchlist for the Summer Weakness
Rule expects oil equities to reflect weak crude prices through 2026 and calls the coming levels a potential once-in-a-decade entry, with ExxonMobil retesting the $100 area as his benchmark. Prepare the list now: highest-quality producers first, since he sees no need to go down the quality trail when the best names trade below net asset value. Set price alerts rather than predictions.
Add Best-of-Best Oil Services Exposure
The sustaining capital catch-up and post-conflict rebuild of the early 2030s should flow disproportionately to service companies. Follow Rule's simplification: rather than handicapping leverage among dozens of names, own the sector leaders (his portfolio is Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Transocean) or find a dedicated services analyst before going further down the list.
Track the Sustaining Capital Thesis with Dates
Rule's supply crunch call is testable: rationing by price in 2029 or 2030 driven by a billion dollars a day of underinvestment. Log the claim, then monitor state producer capital budgets, global upstream spending, and pipeline projects like the Saudi Yanbu upgrade and UAE bypass capacity as leading indicators of whether the thesis is playing out or being spent away.
Sell Into Parabolas You Own
Adopt the hockey stick rule as a standing discipline: when a holding goes hyperbolic, sell at least part of the position into strength, and treat hyperbolic declines in wanted asset classes as accumulation zones. The goal is behavioral, not predictive; the shape of the crowd's behavior is the signal.
Upgrade the Information Diet to Operators
Apply the players-not-journalists filter to macro inputs. For each recurring source, ask whether the speaker has run the institution they comment on. Free starting points from this episode: submit a portfolio for Rule's rankings at Rule Investment Media and work through the free education at Rule Classroom before paying for anything.
Tools & Resources
Mentioned Resources
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Rule Symposium 2026 | Rick Rule's annual natural resource investment conference in Boca Raton, Florida, with in-person and livestream attendance, full recordings for a year, and a money-back guarantee. Discount code VA50 was offered in the episode (expired July 3, 2026). |
| Rule Classroom | Free education platform founded by Rick Rule and Albert Lu, including the Introduction to Natural Resource Investments course and roughly 300 hours of programming Rule recommends as conference preparation. |
| Rule Investment Media | Rule's platform where investors can submit their natural resource stock portfolio for free and receive his one-to-ten rankings with comments, as offered in the interview's closing. |
| Steve Barton on Substack | Home of the In it to Win it premium service, including the premium segment referenced in this episode where Rule reviews Barton's portfolio and comments on the nickel price decline. |
| TradingView | The charting platform used for the on-screen gold, silver, GDX, and XLE charts discussed throughout the interview. New subscribers get a $15 discount through this referral link. |
Suggested Resources
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| BNN Bloomberg: Rule Symposium 2026 Preview | Independent coverage of the July 2026 symposium with speaker lineup, attendance figures, and Rule's contrarian framing of the current gold market. |
| Stockchase: Rick Rule Opinion Archive | A running archive of Rule's company-specific opinions and top picks, useful for tracking how the theses in this interview evolve name by name over time. |
| Canadian Mining Report: Rule's Stock Picking Strategy | A structured breakdown of Rule's selection criteria for junior miners, with direct application to TSX and TSXV listed names relevant to Canadian resource investors. |
| Rule Classroom Review (Canadian Mining Report) | An independent assessment of the free and paid tiers of Rule Classroom, useful before committing time to the 300 hours of programming referenced in the episode. |
Source Material
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[00:02]
Welcome to In It to Win It. This is Steve Barton and thank you for tuning in. We are back with our commodities guru Rick Rule. Rick, thanks for coming back on the show.
Thank you, sir. A pleasure to be back.
It's a pleasure to have you. I always love our talks. Let's start out with gold. I'm going to share my screen here and we will take a quick look at the gold chart. And we have had a nice little pullback here. So, we've got our highs all the way up here, I don't know, 55, 5,600. We're sitting down now just north of 4,000. Are you getting excited on gold and gold stocks yet or what, what's your opinion on gold?
I'm not very excitable. Steve, one of the advantages of having been in markets for 50 years is, you know, I do them for money, not for excitement. Certainly I believe that 10 years from now the gold price will be much higher at least in nominal terms than it is today. So I'm a structural buyer. As a structural buyer, lower prices suit me. The truth is that if you took a $1,000 move in gold either direction, $1,000 higher, I wouldn't be a seller. $1,000 lower, I'd be a big buyer. Lower prices are in my interest because I'm a structural gold buyer. Some of your subscribers may feel very differently. Gold stocks, the way I value them against their net present value, assuming that their production is sold at today's spot price, are as cheap as I've seen them in 40 years. It wouldn't surprise me to see them get cheaper, but I don't care. Sometimes stuff is cheap enough. I need to say by the way I am delighted that this market malaise comes in timing that's coincidental with our conference. It would be embarrassing to be at the podium next week and tell people that I had selected a great great great composite of mining shares but they were all too expensive to buy. The truth is that when you work hard on curated content, it's lovely when that curated content occurs simultaneously with reasonable entry points. So I'm delighted by that chart.
Okay. You mentioned that gold stocks, gold miners, because their margins have gotten so high are cheaper than you've seen them. One thing I've noticed here on the charts is if we zoom in here on the latest price action, we can see that the price of gold has had lower lows, right? So, here on this last pullback around 4,100 and now we've gotten down even south of 4,000, but I'll just use GDX. I'll pull up the premium companies later, but here with GDX, if you really get into the weeds here, this has actually made a lower high. Do you take anything into that divergence there that gold made a new low but the gold stocks didn't?
No, Steve, I'll leave the technical stuff to you. My life is all about the delta between price and value. Market behavior is interesting in terms of timing and perhaps because I ignore technical analysis, my timing is usually lousy. But the truth is I've made money over time. If I have an entrance that has to do with value as opposed to momentum, my exit takes care of itself. And you know, I mean I guess I wish after 50 years I had known more about technical analysis but the truth is that fundamental analysis, the amount of time it takes me to do net present value calculations and net asset value calculations, takes up all my time. I don't have time to learn a new skill. That's why folks like you are in the Rule classroom so that we could bring different expertise to bear on the same challenges.
Okay. All right. So no opinion there on that one. Yeah, and thank you for having me in the classroom. I love doing the technical analysis charts and just having people throw questions at me. Okay, so moving on to silver. We've also had a wonderful pullback in here in silver. We got up to 120 bucks or a little bit north of that. You were a very public seller around this zone over here. We've now had a 50% haircut here in silver, spot silver. What are your thoughts on silver?
Well, Steve, I can talk to that chart because that's one I understand. When you have a hyperbolic up move, which is demonstrated so well here in this chart, they almost always reconcile themselves down. The Canadians call that a hockey stick
[05:00]
graph. And the backside of a hockey stick is just as steep as the front side, just a lot less fun. If you're wrong, if I'm in an asset class and I see a chart that looks like that, I'm a seller. If I desire to be in an asset class where I see a hyperbolic down move, I'm often a buyer. I didn't sell because necessarily of that hockey stick graph. I sold because I owned silver in a speculative account. And my reason for owning silver was that when it became an unhated asset, it would recover in price. But it didn't recover. It went hyperbolic. And in this particular case, that chart, that chart does explain my timing. Did I sell anywhere near the top? No. Did I take a great big fat slug out of the middle? Yes. Which is the best I can hope to do.
What would you say your average entry point was on this chart?
25 bucks.
Oh, wow. Okay.
You know, I tend to hold things longer than traders do. For a while time value of money was getting in the way of my trade. But the truth is usually if you enter well you come into a period where you get paid so much rent for entering well that the time value of money becomes irrelevant. You know, I don't know if I had a four-year-old or a 5-year-old. I haven't paid attention. I guess my accountant could tell you. But a highly certain five-year trade from $20 to $75 is a lot of fun. A lot of fun. There's a lot of people that tell you about 90-day triples. It's just that not many people experience them.
Good point. Okay. And I personally have started, I trimmed a little bit on the top up here. This is PSLV, the Sprott physical silver fund, and started adding here down on the downside. Have you done something similar yet with silver?
No, no, silver. I save in gold. And so I've been a consistent gold buyer almost irrespective of the chart. I speculate in silver and I speculated in silver because it was hated. And it isn't hated yet. And the silver stocks are cheaper than silver is. Which is ironic. If the silver price increases, the silver stocks will probably increase. The silver stocks are priced at a discount to today's value of silver. So if silver trades sideways, the silver stocks will likely outperform silver. Paradoxically, if the silver price declines, because the valuations in the silver mining companies discount lower prices, they'll probably decline less. So when I think about those two factors, I'll reflect my speculative instincts in the silver market in the silver equities rather than in silver itself.
Okay. Okay. So more so this chart, and this one kind of did something similar although silver went down. SIJ here, the junior silver miners, basically flatlined. So I don't know if that's a forecast, is that maybe we've hit a bottom in the silver stocks. I don't know. We'll see.
I'll leave that to you. All I do is relative valuations.
Okay. All right. Okay. We have your Rule Symposium coming up which I am very excited about. And like you said, I think it's probably pretty fortuitous that we had a nice pullback here in some of the stocks. Now we have the live stream available which everyone is going to have to review because even when you're physically at the conference, there'll be four presenters at the same time and it's impossible to be in all four rooms at the same time. So you got to go back and watch the tapes. What can our members expect when they sign up for the virtual symposium?
Funny you mentioned the live stream. Our mutual friend Albert Lu when he's at the conference physically often sits in his room in swimming trunks and watches the conference via live stream, which is hilarious. I'll leave that one alone. The live stream is a way that people can participate in the conference without frankly having to go to South Florida in the summer. Last year we had 1,400 people attend live stream from 33 countries around the world and they get a very good experience. We have a full-time host with live stream, Paul Harris, who actually records all of the conference, plus it's as though you had your own conference concierge. It's very very very useful. So let's talk about the conference in general before we go back to the live stream
[10:00]
technology. First of all, the conference has been around about 30 years. And if you make something a little bit better every year, after 30 years, it gets pretty good. It is, with the exception of the New Orleans conference, the longest running retail, gold, and natural resource conference on the planet. And in fairness, the New Orleans conference, which is a great conference, is more a general investing conference than a precious metals and raw materials conference. What sets us apart? Well, to begin with, although participants are at the conference physically for four days, our conference unlike any other conference in the world goes on for 12 months. We interview every exhibitor before the conference so that our attendees can show up at the conference better prepared. This does two things. It helps the attendee but it also lets the attendee know that we have invested in their success. We ask every attendee to apply the lessons learned for free in the Rule classroom, in particular Introduction to Natural Resource Investments, to the content in the conference. No other conference promoter has 300 hours of programming for free to prepare them for the conference. At the conference, we do things differently. When we have people doing our macro presentations, they aren't journalists, they're players. Jim Rickards talked about the fragile nature of Wall Street. How would he have known? Well, he was general counsel of Long-Term Capital Management, which damn near brought down Wall Street. He spoke from the belly of the beast. David Stockman, when he talked about why Doge would fail, how did he know? Was he a Wall Street Journal staff reporter? No. He ran the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan. He presided over the first failure to reduce the size of government and talked about why politics would derail it this time. Again, not a journalist, but a player. Nomi Prins talks about the corrupt nature of Wall Street. How would she know? She was a Goldman Sachs partner, from the belly of the beast. Danielle DiMartino Booth talks about the Fed. How would she know about the Fed? Because she was senior researcher at the Dallas Fed. It's important that people understand that our macro commentators are people who speak from the belly of the beast. They are people with operational experience in the bureaucracies, in the organizations that they comment on. Critical difference. We move from there to analysts and securities analysts and portfolio managers. Unlike many presentations which come from, you know, wet behind the ears newsletter writers who've only existed through 18 months of a bull market, our people have 30 or 40 years of experience. The John Hathaways of the world, the Adrian Days of the world, people who've been through good markets and bad, people who know natural resource investing as a consequence of three decades of benefit in the sector. Importantly, Steve, and you've noted this in your show, every single public company exhibitor at our conference has been vetted. Specifically, if we don't own shares in them, they can't appear on a conference floor. We accepted, I think it was 68 exhibitors this year. We turned down over 130. Doesn't mean that every stock that I buy goes up, but it does mean that we vetted every damned one of them well enough that we own them. And then we go the extra mile. We have the living legends at our conference, people who built multi-billion dollar companies from scratch, telling you from the podium what lessons they learned and how that makes you a better investor and telling you what they're doing with their own money today. Very, very, very useful feature, I think. Finally, unlike any other investment conference that I know of on the planet... oh, I should say one other thing. We record everything. Whether you attend live or live stream, you have access to the recordings for the rest of the year. And you're going to need it because we're going to give you 46 hours of dense programming in four days. And you can't comprehend it. As you said, sometimes there are four breakout sessions simultaneously. How can you be four places at once? You can't. I put on the conference and I have to review the tapes. Finally, we interview many of our exhibitors six months after the conference. We ask them to tell us what news they're likely to be able to give us six months from now. And then we review whether or not they did it. In other words, if you come to the Rule Symposium, you get 12 months worth of conference in four days. And on top of that, we have a money back guarantee. If you think that you didn't get your money's worth, whether you attended live or live stream, no problem. I give you your money back. And you are the judge, not me. Now, in 30 years of money back guarantees, we've had to refund less than one tenth of 1% of the fees we've charged, but that guarantee is your guarantee that our content can make you money.
[15:02]
Awesome. I love it. This will be my fifth symposium. And yeah, I always review the live streams as well. And Cali gave us a discount, but the discount is only good for 48 hours. So, it expires July 3rd. And that discount code on checkout is VA, Victor Alpha, 50. So VA50, secure your little discount and we will see you there. So thank you very much, Rick. I look forward to it. I look forward to being out there. Always a blast. Always fun.
See you there, Steve. We're going to work here real hard this year.
Yes, somehow I'm able to work 60 hours in four days. It just happens every time. Great. Okay. Let's move on to oil. I'm going to pull up the oil chart here. And we've had a quite a significant little sell-off here. So, maybe kind of give us the macro picture here. Oil. I think the last time you and I took a deep dive with oil was with Mike Rothman. What's happened since then? Did we dodge a bullet? I was expecting $20 gas here out in California and that looks like it's not going to happen. What do you see?
Well, if Governor Newsom gets his way, you'll see $20 gas irrespective of the oil price, but that's a different discussion. If the hostilities in the straits are over, I think you'll see a continuation of that chart for a little while. Two things happened. There were a couple hundred cargos north of the straits that were and are able to get through. What you saw in the high points of that chart weren't rationing by price. They were prices in anticipation of a shortage. We had enough floating inventory and enough strategic petroleum reserves in various countries, United States, China, and Japan among them, that with the exception of certain countries that didn't have the budget to store oil, we never had a shortage. We did have a circumstance where there were cargos that were loaded during $110 pricing that unloaded at $140. In other words, there were $30 a barrel premiums that don't show up on that chart. But what happened is that that period of very high prices has resulted, I think, in demand destruction in low-income economies around the world. And so you're going to see structurally lower oil demand for as much as six months, as well as, of course, the resumption of supply. So I suspect that the oil price will continue relatively weak through 2026. What your chart doesn't show, but what I want your listeners to understand, is that we're going to have rationing by price in 2029 or 2030, not because of war, but rather because the oil industry, particularly the paristatals, have been underinvesting in sustaining capital to the tune of a billion dollars a day for a couple years, and they continue to do it. Obviously during the conflict Iran wasn't making sustaining capital investments. They had other things to do with the money. The Saudis weren't. The Emiratis weren't. The Kuwaitis weren't. And in addition to those deferred sustaining capital investments, we blew up a bunch of capital goods in all those countries that will need to be replaced. The underinvestment that we're making now as a species worldwide in sustaining capital investment will result in lower producing capabilities absolutely positively without fail unless we pick up our spending, which we aren't going to do. So the price levels that you saw two months ago, three months ago, are price levels that you are going to see in 2029, 2030. Understand that if you are an investor whose time frame isn't limited to a long weekend, the oil equity prices that you see coming this summer, I suspect, will be once in a decade experiences.
The oil equities that are coming this summer, the those...
I think the pricing that you see when the oil equities reflect the lower crude oil prices. That chart that you see doesn't anticipate shortages in 2029. And the market will look at that chart. They will look at the three-month past performance and not look at the inevitability of lower production.
Oh, you're saying that we're going to have a great buying opportunity.
We're going to have a spectacular buying opportunity. A spectacular buying opportunity. You're going to see Exxon back at the levels, I suspect, that it was last October.
Oh wow.
You'll recall, Steve, that the last time you and I talked about Exxon, I said recommending Exxon at 90 and recommending an Exxon at 180 are very different circumstances. Well, I think we get to retest 100 on Exxon again.
[20:01]
Oh wow.
And if you think about that and you think about the likely price of Exxon in 2030, the probability of the price that you'll see in 2030, you don't need to go too far down the quality trail when the best of the best is selling at a substantial discount to net asset value. Now, the basket of Canadian juniors that you and I talked about in previous interviews, they've fallen pretty dramatically already, but they'll likely fall further and they represent a spectacular three or four-year opportunity.
Okay. Okay. So, here's XLE, just the oil ETF.
At this year's conference we're adding Keith Hill as a speaker. Keith Hill, for those who don't know, is a real expert on oil and gas exploration. He ran or co-ran the Lundin family's oil exploration business for 30 years. Next year, I would suspect that 15 or 20% of the conference will be around oil and energy, not just one speaker. That shows the level of my commitment to this trade. The conference, if you take it back 25 years ago, was probably 50/50 oil and mining. Oil will be an important feature in this year's conference, but it'll be a really important feature in next year's conference.
It'll be stage front. Okay. All right. Keith Hill. Okay. So, here's XLE. So, this, trimming up here when it was going parabolic, starting to nibble here, basically like red, yellow, and green lines. Green means it's a good deal, go. Does this seem about right? I mean, this is when we were cherry-picking this stuff before, but you're thinking we could get all the way down back to pre-war levels.
Yeah. You know, I don't try to bottom pick, to be honest with you, Steve. I'm not that smart. Sometimes stuff gets cheap enough. So, when I'm able to buy stuff at a 25% discount to what I think it's worth, I'll buy it. If it goes to a 50% discount to what it's worth, I'll buy more. I remember it was Bernard Baruch who said that the only guy who bought absolute bottoms and sold absolute tops was a liar. It didn't happen. And certainly I'm evidence of that. I just try to take a nice fat slug out of the middle.
Just like you did with silver. Okay. How about, now the oil, I'm just spitballing here. But with, when it came to all the tankers tied up in the Strait of Hormuz, I mean, I was watching a guy that follows some of the maritime workers and seamen out there that were just stuck on those tankers. And I got to believe they're a little hesitant to go back into the strait after, you know, it seems like the war is on and off every other week. I got to believe there's going to be some businesses that are going to try to find another way around. Like maybe this oil pullback is, like you said, it'll kind of have a little doldrum in the summer before, you know what I mean? Like I got to believe that the tankers aren't just going to go right back in there and start filling up. Any thoughts on that?
I suspect that maritime trade will increase. If the workers are hesitant, wages and salaries are a tiny part of the total cost of transporting oil and gas. So I suspect an accommodation will be achieved. The real bottleneck will be insurance premiums. And what you're already seeing is that sovereigns, the Chinese, the Japanese, and yes, the Americans, are subsidizing insurance premiums for tankers, which is to say the risk is moving from the tanker owner to the taxpayer. Time-honored technique. You will certainly see the Saudis upgrade the Yanbu pipeline, the pipeline that goes across Saudi Arabia and allows the Saudis to ship as much as 7 million barrels a day out of Yanbu on the Red Sea. And you will certainly see increases in capacity with the UAE pipeline that will allow the transshipment of oil from north of the Straits of Hormuz to exit the Straits of Hormuz in Oman. You will see that. You will see it because the underlying conflict between Sunni Islam and Shia Islam, which is to say between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran, is not over. And the conflict that both sides regard as existential between Iran and Israel is not over. Whether or not the United States plays a continuing role in that conflict is a
[25:00]
different set of circumstances. But I think a lot of people are suggesting that the Iranian leadership in particular views a hardline position as existential for them. And I believe, given the statements by Netanyahu, that he believes the same thing for the state of Israel. The fact that the conflict between the two appears to be intractable and that both sides believe it to be existential suggests that the political turmoil around the Straits of Hormuz is not over. Were I the Saudis, understanding that, particularly as a player in the context of the conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam, making the upgrades necessary to make the Yanbu Trans-Arabian Peninsula pipeline more robust seems like a good idea.
What are your thoughts on oil services? I mean, like from a macro big picture, I got to believe that blowing up oil infrastructure is going to be really good for companies like Halliburton and, you know, Schlumberger and guys like that. Am I off?
No. What you see from a macro perspective is very true. It isn't just the repair of the stuff that's been blown up. It's the fact that in the early part of the decade of the 2030s, we're going to need to make up for that deferred sustaining capital investment. And those guys are going to coin money. Now, I'm not smart enough to tell you who the most leveraged players are. I've been trying to play oil services businesses with limited success for 40 years. So, I just buy the best of the best. I own Schlumberger. I own Halliburton. I own Rig. That's my whole portfolio. And I expect to make a boatload of money on that portfolio.
Okay. Have you started buying them yet or are you waiting for the summer?
I started buying them before this. You'll recall, Steve, when you and I talked about oil last year, I wasn't pressing enough to say there was going to be a war. I was buying the oil service companies and the oil companies because of a shortage that I thought would develop in 2029. I just got lucky. Now, I say I got lucky. I didn't sell anything. That runup that you see in the chart, unlike the silver chart, I didn't sell anything, because I'm thinking in, you know, 3, 4, 5 year long terms. But I was certainly a buyer of the oil field service companies because of the sustaining capital deficits, the fact that that spending needs to be made up for. If that spending isn't made up for, Steve, your car won't start. Your governor notwithstanding.
Okay. Okay. Yeah, I'm pretty heavy producers right now and very light services, so it's probably time to maybe on this next drawdown, build that part up.
You might want to do the work that you did in finding the gentleman who shared the discussion that you and I did about oil. You might do the work to go, you know, to Jeff or some place like that and find a good oil services analyst. I don't happen to be that person.
Okay. Okay. All right. I will. Okay. We're going to go a little bit deeper with premium subscribers. Rick, any final thoughts?
None. Although I really encourage all of you to join us at the symposium. If you can't for some reason, if you don't know us well enough yet, there's always next year. Until next year, you can learn more about the way I think around natural resources for free by listing the natural resource stocks that you own at Rule Investment Media. I'll rank them one to 10. I'll give you comments on issues where I think my comments might have value. Filter that through 300 hours of educational programming at the Rule classroom for free. A really, really, really good price. If you do those two things, even if you can't make the conference this year, I'll get you next year. You'll be at the conference next year.
Awesome. We will put all those links down below. And remember, your discount code that expires on July 3rd is VA50. Rick, thank you very much for your time. You have a wonderful rest of your day.
Pleasure, Steve. Thank you.
In the premium segment, Rick gives his take on the recent plunge in nickel prices. Then we screen share and Rick reviews my portfolio directly as we go down the list, commodity by commodity, company by company. He breaks down what he likes, what he would avoid, where he thinks I may be taking too much risk, and which sectors he believes deserve more weight going forward. Are you positioned in quality names, or are you just chasing leverage? Join us in the premium for Rick's full portfolio breakdown. Right now, we're also running our 15% off Fourth of July firecracker sale. You can sign up for a premium membership at a discounted rate. And as long as you never lapse, you will be grandfathered in at that price. The link is down below. Thank you so much for your support. You have a wonderful rest of your day and happy trading.
[30:02]
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End of Transcript
AI Prompt
AI-generated from source material. Verify important details against the original source.
AI Implementation Prompt
CONTEXT You are working from a July 2026 interview between Steve Barton (In it to Win it) and Rick Rule, a natural resource investor with more than 50 years of market experience and founder of Rule Investment Media. The interview took place after a sharp pullback across gold (from roughly $5,500-5,600 to just above $4,000), silver (a roughly 50 percent decline from above $120), and oil. Rule's core thesis: gold mining stocks, valued against net present value with all production assumed sold at today's spot price, are the cheapest he has seen in 40 years. He is a structural gold buyer with a ten-year horizon, so lower prices work in his favor. He sold silver into its hyperbolic run (entered around $25) and now expresses his speculative silver view through silver mining equities, which are priced at a discount to today's silver price. On energy, he expects oil to stay relatively weak through 2026 due to demand destruction and resuming supply, but forecasts rationing by price in 2029 or 2030 because state oil producers have underinvested in sustaining capital by roughly a billion dollars a day for years, with wartime destruction of capital goods deepening the deficit. He owns Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Transocean as his entire oil services portfolio and expects ExxonMobil to retest the $100 area, framing coming oil equity weakness as a once-in-a-decade entry. His method is entirely fundamental: net present value and net asset value work, no technical analysis, staged buying at 25 and 50 percent discounts to estimated value, and selling into parabolic strength without attempting to top-tick. KEY PRINCIPLES 1. Define whether you are a saver or a speculator in each asset before volatility arrives; the label dictates the correct response to price moves. 2. Value producers against NPV at today's spot price, with no forward price optimism; cheapness under conservative assumptions makes higher prices free optionality. 3. Investment decisions rest on the delta between price and value; timing is a byproduct, not the process. 4. Buy at a 25 percent discount to estimated value, add at a 50 percent discount; take the fat slug out of the middle rather than picking bottoms and tops. 5. Hyperbolic advances almost always reconcile downward; sell into parabolas you own and consider buying after parabolic declines in wanted asset classes. 6. When equities discount lower commodity prices than spot, they offer better asymmetry than the commodity in flat, rising, and falling scenarios. 7. Sustained underinvestment in sustaining capital guarantees future supply shortfalls; the market extrapolates recent price action and misses mechanically declining production. 8. In sectors that are hard to handicap, own the best of the best rather than chasing leverage. 9. Weight information sources by operational experience: players over journalists. 10. Time horizon is an edge; multi-year positioning captures what weekend-length time frames cannot. KEY LEVERS - Valuation discipline: NPV and NAV at conservative prices as the gate for every entry. - Position sizing and staging: laddered buys at defined discounts, partial sales into strength. - Asset role assignment: savings versus speculation, per position. - Relative value: commodity versus its equities, quality versus leverage, producers versus services. - Time horizon: three-to-five-year theses (oil services, 2029-2030 supply crunch) held through interim volatility. - Information sourcing: operators, vetted companies, and long-track-record analysts. WHAT THIS IS NOT - This is not a technical analysis framework; Rule explicitly refuses chart-based signals, and momentum entries contradict the method. - This is not bottom-picking; the framework assumes entries will look early and exits will look premature. - This is not a prediction that gold or oil rises on any specific date; the 2029-2030 oil call is a supply argument, not a price target with a deadline for equities. - This is not a recommendation to buy leveraged juniors indiscriminately; Rule stresses quality first and notes the best names already trade below net asset value. - This is not financial advice; it is one investor's framework, and all claims should be independently verified. IMPLEMENTATION MODES 1. Apply: help me classify my current holdings as savings or speculation and stress-test whether my planned responses to rallies and drawdowns match each label. 2. Build: help me construct a watchlist and laddered buy plan for gold miners, silver equities, oil producers, or oil services names using the 25/50 percent discount structure. 3. Diagnose: review a position or portfolio for momentum-based entries, parabolic holdings that should be trimmed, and leverage substituting for quality. 4. Critique: argue against Rule's theses; identify what would falsify the sustaining capital supply crunch, the silver equity discount, or the 40-year cheapness claim. 5. Teach: explain NPV-at-spot valuation, the savings-versus-speculation distinction, or the equity-versus-commodity asymmetry with worked examples. 6. Decision Support: when a target hits a defined discount level, walk me through the checklist before I add capital. 7. Research Expansion: identify data sources for tracking global upstream sustaining capital spending, state producer budgets, and Middle East pipeline capacity projects. 8. Content Creation: help me turn these frameworks into analytical writing in a dry, data-grounded, observational voice, without hype and without em dashes. 9. Opportunity Discovery: screen for other sectors where equities currently discount lower commodity prices than spot. 10. System Design: help me build a standing review process that logs dated theses (like rationing by price in 2029-2030) and checks them against incoming evidence. AI OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS Stay grounded in the source material and the frameworks above. Focus on practical implementation over commentary. Do not offer generic motivational advice. Ask clarifying questions when my situation is ambiguous. Challenge weak assumptions directly, including mine, and flag when a proposed action contradicts the framework (for example, a momentum entry described as a value buy). Draw connections to adjacent domains when genuinely useful, such as Canadian junior miners, land and exploration work, or energy services activity in Western Canada. Note where Rule's claims are dated and testable so they can be tracked rather than assumed. GUIDED DISCOVERY Ask me up to three questions, one at a time, to determine: (1) what I am trying to accomplish, (2) which ideas from this source are most relevant to my situation, (3) how these concepts could be applied most effectively. Once you understand my situation, help me build a practical implementation plan.