Precious Metals Outlook: Rick Rule sees a euphoric but extended cycle in gold and silver, noting outsized margin expansion for producers at current prices.
Silver Miners vs Physical: He sold most physical silver after a large gain and rotated into high-quality silver equities for greater leverage if prices hold.
Key Companies: He cites Wheaton Precious Metals, Pan American Silver, Buenaventura, Vizsla Silver, and AbraSilver as part of his quality silver stock allocation.
Optionality Plays: Classic optionality worked historically, but today’s entry valuations are too high; better risk/reward may lie in quality producers rerating to higher price decks.
Earnings Surprises: Near-term upside is likely as analysts use outdated gold/silver assumptions, setting up positive earnings surprises for producers.
Junior Miners Risk: He warns of widespread dilution and low-quality issuers, emphasizing management track records, real value creation, and avoiding most juniors.
Strategy Focus: Prefers prospect generators and sees strong decade-ahead growth for royalty/streaming businesses, while maintaining a macro view of fiat devaluation supporting gold.
Transcript
Hello and welcome back to Sore Financially here from the floor of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference 2026 in Vancouver. Obviously, my name is Kai Hoffman. I'm the Edj Mining guy over on X and of course your host of this channel. Really looking forward to catching up with an old friend of the channel, Rick Rule. We last spoke in Germany back in uh mid November uh 6 weeks now. What is it now? 8 weeks later. It feels like it's a completely different world yet again. Uh gold at close to $5,000, silver at $100. How's your mood? >> My mood's actually excellent. And before we go on, congratulations on your fine conference. This was my first time. I enjoyed myself. Thank you for hosting me. Thank you for having the tenacity to put on a conference. Uh, you know, the mood is clearly ebulent. Uh, I I I think it's fair to say that this market is a market that's probably ahead of itself. People need to know that. Uh, but I also think it's a market that if your patient has some legs. So there there's a sort of a dichomous answer. Let's dissect it though. Like when you say market, is it the mining market? Is it the mining company valuations? Or is it the gold and silver price? Like >> Yes. Yes. And yes. >> Okay. >> Uh and I don't think there's a one-sizefitsall answer to any of that. I don't suspect that the senior the senior miners are grievously overvalued. If you assume that current commodity prices are a baseline, it's important to note that if the gold price goes from $3,000 to $5,000, that doesn't mean that producers margins go up 40%. It means that producer margins go up 300%. And I think it's important to understand that when you come down the quality trail, however, if you come to the companies around here that are looking for gold, if the price of a commodity you don't have any of goes up, it shouldn't really matter to your valuation, but the valuations go up, too. And in that sense, speculators need to be cautious. >> What do you use as a baseline? Personally, when you do your models and things with your team, do you use spot? >> I use a matrix. Uh, I do I use spot and the forward strip for my base case. I use a 25% discount to that for my stress case and I use a 25% premium to that for my upside case and I compare uh based on deposit efficiency the discrepancy between the downside and the upside. Uh, in other words, do I have positive leverage in an upside scenario to a downside scenario? >> Okay. >> No, I I work pretty hard at this obviously. uh you know a lot of people's technique has got a hunch bet a bunch mine's a bit more sophisticated >> sounds like it absolutely yeah no you definitely proper models behind it but uh >> Rick I want to ask a question I think our audience is waiting for it to get answered and you might have answered it elsewhere as well but uh you you recently said you sold all your silver and you bought silver stocks so run us a bit through the rationale behind that >> that's not quite true I sold 80% of my physical silver >> I kept 20% um and I sold it because silver occupied ies the speculative part of my portfolio. I said in your conference, I save in gold. I maintain liquidity in US dollars and I speculated in physical silver. I bought my s physical silver four or five years ago when it was hated and I bought it specifically because it was hated. My belief was that when the hate wore off that silver would clear up to 50 bucks. I was wrong. It cleared to 75 and beyond that today. in my portfolio when an asset class performs to expectation I sell it. Uh I reallocated the money speculatively too I reallocated it 50% as to silver stocks high quality silver stocks. My rationale was if silver stayed within spitting distance of today's price if it didn't go up for a year the highquality silver stocks would go up by 50 or 60%. So I felt that there was more speculative leverage in the high quality silver stocks than there was in physical silver. >> Absolutely not. >> I also had a 7 figure gain and you haven't I I need to stress that you haven't made the money Kai unless you've taken it. >> Yeah. Paper gains are you worthless. >> Correct. >> Right. Absolutely. No, it makes a lot of sense. Um did you have enough or did you find enough quality silver companies to actually allocate to? Maybe that's the other question here in this >> Yeah. Some of them might be described as silver companies in drag. Uh I consider Wheat and Precious to be a silver company. Uh I consider Pan-American to be a silver company. I consider perhaps erroneously ples and buenura to be silver companies. But for the amount of money I had to allocate, it was fine. I didn't come very far down the quality trail. Uh on the speculative side, I I uh allocated some more to both Abra and Visla Silver, but that's as far down the quality trail I went, which is pretty high. >> Well, they're excellent worldclass developers, right? Absolutely. Like Visa Silver is supposed to be one of the largest silver producers, single asset silver producers if they go into production. So, no, fantastic. Um you mentioned it earlier before we hit the record button that uh not all, you know, trees don't trees don't grow into the sky. There's usually a limit to it at some point. Like what's your assessment of the market right now? Like where are we at? You said overvalued already, but >> it's ahead of itself. >> What could upset the train though? >> This is a re I don't know. I mean, one thing that can upset the train is it simply gets overvalued. >> Uh if you see these uh parabolic charts, the Canadians call them hockey stick charts around silver as an example. I've learned in 50 years in the market that the backside of a hockey stick is just as steep as the front side and much less fun if you're long. So, a lot of people get excited by hockey stick graphs and I get terrified. Uh, you know, I'll just say that I'm an old man. I've been through a lot of markets. Uh, I like to take my money. I I'm in of two positions. I think and I've said this at your conference uh I think over the next 10 years the real purchasing power of the dollar declines by 75%. Which suggests that the gold price in nominal term should do well. I also believe separately that our society has underinvested in productive capacity around industrial materials, copper, oil, things like that for 30 years. There will be supply shortages. So the long-term macro is spectacular. I had an expectation that 2025 would be a good year, which I interpret as a 25 to 30% portfolio gain. I got 150 to 175. That suggests to me that I've used up 3 years of gains in one year. And that tells me that I needed to take some money off the table. >> You underperformed the GDX though. >> Probably. You know what happens in a rampant bull market is that the worst product does the best. And I think you saw that uh what worked for speculators in the last half of 2025 was leverage. By definition, the marginal producers, the high-cost producers are the most leverage. So what really happened is, as Doug Casey says, the turkeys flew, the wind blew, and even the turkeys could fly. >> Yeah. Well, it's the optionality place that everybody's crowding into uh as well. Um what do you make of those like optionality plays? Maybe define that real quick for us as well. Um is it just ounces in the ground or is it really horrible cost structure producers? >> Uh the traditional optionality play in mining has been in a commodity that's priced below the cost of production. If you buy a deposit that isn't economic at current prices, but is economic at a price that the commodity would have to go to for the industry not to be in liquidation. Optionality made me by my standards a boatload of money in the early 90s because after the decade of the 1980s nobody thought resource stocks were going anywhere. So as an example forming silver standard and Pan-American silver we were able to buy deposits that had been they' cost 70 or 80 million to drill off. They made no money at $5 silver. Probably wouldn't make any money till $15 silver. We were able to buy those deposits for 10 cents an ounce. We were able to buy deposits that had cost people 75 million, $80 million to discover. We were able to buy them for 2 million bucks, 3 million bucks. We made so much money in those days that we popularized a whole sector. The difficulty today with optionality is the cover charge. The the market capitalization that you have to pay to participate is way way way too high. For a trader, it still works. For an investor, uh, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I >> I was gonna ask you, isn't the whole sector an optionality player right now? Like it feels like every asset is all of a sudden super economic. I wouldn't have touched some of the companies at 24 $2,500 gold at 48 5,000 like everything seems to be great. >> I think ironically now the optionality goes the other way. Uh I think that some of the higher quality producing companies with less single company risk, single deposit risk, uh in the silver business as an example are priced to discount $45 silver. If we maintain $80 silver, the market will begin to redo net present value calculations using 80 as a baseline as opposed to 40 and those stocks will rerate. That isn't thousand% optionality, but it is lowrisk double. And a lowrisisk double is pretty good. >> No, absolutely. Because that's many of the bank analysts like Raymond James or like RBC, they still use much lower long-term price forecasts. And I think that's the opportunity as well. >> And there's a near-term opportunity, Kai, that you need to pay attention to. Right now, you know, the earning season comes in really soon, two weeks, three weeks. >> February 19th, I think, new month usually kicks it off, I believe. So the Bay Street analysts and the Wall Street analysts as you point out uh are making their earnings forecast based on 32 or 30 $3 to $300 gold. If you're new, you're selling the stuff for 45 and the earnings calls predicated on 3,300. How do you not have a surprise? >> Yeah. Q Q4 gold average I think was 4150 by my calculations. So >> So if they're selling the stuff for $600 more than their forecast, it's going to be if they don't have a surprise, that's going to be a surprise. Absolutely. Now the market is oblivious to it I think as still so there's still opportunity left of course um I've been asked that and I want to come back to this like is there anything that could upset the train card here that really >> first of all overvaluation that's the first thing I mean there's a lot of stocks that are ahead of themselves >> in the junior sector uh you know we all make fun of governments Kai counterfeiting >> there's nobody who counterfeits as well as the junior mining sector I mean in terms of in terms of selling overpriced valueless paper. >> Yeah. >> The private sector always outco competes the public sector. Yeah. >> And everybody and their brothers raising money now >> and if you agree with my thesis, which I've talked about in your show before, >> that 85% of these companies are valueless, >> if they raise money at any price, it's accretive to them and dilutive to you. >> At some point in time, the creation of new shares overwhelms the money available to buy those shares, and you get a near-term collapse. And that's going to happen. I mean, how how many previous tripledigit GDXJ years have we seen? >> I can't remember too many to be honest. And uh it's it's been a while for me at least. So, um talking about it, let's stay on that topic. You you're always been big on like the sector's overfunded. So, we got over 1400 companies in Canada alone seeking capital and we raised record amounts last year. Uh it wasn't 2011 levels yet, but uh we're we're getting there. it feels like 2026 has the the pedigree to reach those levels. Um, how do you look at things now? Like when you'd say, "Okay, these these these dog companies are still printing shares." Um, like but how do you differentiate it now? Like >> I I ignore them basically. Uh, I if I was generous, if there were 1,400 public mining companies in Canada, I would suggest that probably as many as 250 were not valueless, but the rest are valueless. They're completely valueless. So, if a company doesn't have a team that has been successful in the past, I don't want to know. I just don't want to know. If the company isn't involved in an activity that I can understand that will generate real value, not some junky little mind, but real value, I don't want to know. When I go to the booth and I say to the management team, tell me your most important unanswered question. Tell me how you can increase the market's knowledge of your project project in a way that's meaningful. 80% of the time that I ask the question, the manager says to me, well, I've never thought about it that way. which is to suggest that uh these companies don't have a plan. >> Yeah. >> It's very difficult Kai to get somewhere if you don't have a plan. >> Exactly. >> Can you imagine yourself coming from Frankfurt to Vancouver with no itinerary? >> It would be to be honest. It'd be very liberating. But uh I know what you mean. >> I wouldn't want to watch it. >> No, no, I I hear you though. But uh >> in this sector like $7 billion roughly raised last year, right? And but the the junior end like the companies without only or with only a concept, >> right, >> are still suffering mercifully, >> right? So so maybe like just trying to get to understand like where are we in this cycle right now? >> When when my friend Ross Bey has a concept, he funds it himself. When Robert Freiedland has a concept, he funds it himself. When Bob Quain has a concept, he funds it itself. When it gets derisked enough that they can attract funds at a premium, then they go public. When the lame, the halt, and the blind have a concept, they haven't been successful in the past, so they can't fund it themselves, and they try to sell that to me based on the fact that they can't fund it. Well, that to me isn't to virtue. >> Can I ask you a pointed question actually? Like, we've talked about it like Kendall, Ze Ze Flood, like you you talked about him on our show before. Um, would you have funded him when he started his company? >> I didn't fund him when he started his company. Uh, although I did business with his dad for three decades, I didn't fund him when he started his company. There are people like my good friend John Tognetti who do that. There are people like John Toggnetti who have enough sense of their ability to judge people that they'll take the risk on a Zach Flood at a nickel and they're perfectly happy to lose the nickel knowing that one time in five they back the right guy and they turn that nickel into a buck 75. >> That's not my game. >> $330 right now. So 38 point. Yeah. >> No, absolutely. Um you know we're we're overwhelmed here. There's a ton of mining companies, exploration companies around us here as well. How do you maintain discipline? >> That's easy for me. Uh I'm old first of all. Uh all of the mistakes that these people will probably be making for the first time, I made the decade of the 70s. Uh and those mistakes are still fresh in my mind. Uh in that first bull market when I was a very young man, I played the game hard. I was here. I was knowledgeable. I was personable. And I made by a young man's standards a lot of money. And I made it at a time when other people in financial services in a bare market were losing money. I made the mistake then of confusing a bull market with brains. And I went from being a very wealthy young man to having a negative net worth. Uh and that lesson stuck with me. It'll never happen to me again. I buy hate. I sell love. Love is on offer here. So, I'm a seller. >> There's a lot of love here. Absolutely. A lot of hugging. I see. So, absolutely. Um, no. Rick, and I know I sort of bit of a rhetorical question because I know the answer, I think, is is really like how do you deal with FOMO as well? You see stocks going up left, right, and center? I don't have it. >> You don't have it? >> No. I mean, I I got a lot of faults. >> No. >> Uh, I'm too fat. I drink too much. >> Fo FOMO. >> No, >> that's not one. Okay. >> Uh, I sold my silver at uh probably average 75 bucks, went to 100. I'm glad the guy made the last 25. I don't care. I made from 20 to 75 in my pock. Well, pre-tax in my pocket. That's great. I, you know, I bought silver because I could I thought it could go to 50. >> It went to 75 instead. I think your audience needs to understand that there are two primary forms of mistake errors. One is the error of omission where you miss out on some of what you could have made or you didn't buy something that went up. The other is errors of commission where you lose money. Errors of omission are better than errors of commission. >> That makes a lot of sense. And paying commission to the broker who actually put you into that deal, right? Absolutely. Um Rick, you were on the show and maybe switching gears just a little bit and you said, "Well, I don't want to see gold at $5,000 cuz that means the world is in deep deep dudoo." Um are we in deep deep dudoo? >> We are. I mean, don't get me wrong, we're going to get through this. But the next 10 years are going to be a lot more challenging than the last 40 were. What the $5,000 gold price is telling you is what I've been saying on your show for four or five years, which is to suggest that fiat currencies, almost all of them, will lose a substantial amount of their purchasing power over the next 10 years. And that real interest rates are negative. That the money that you make on a euro denominated bond or a dollar denominated bond is less than the rate of inflation. Um, that's a lousy outcome. The period 1982 to 2022 was probably the most benign financial climate in human history. And people are still tra still trained to expect benign climate. And the next 10 years, if I'm right about the decline in purchasing power of fiat currencies, will be much less benign. If you think about uh you live in in Germany, so a Euro zone denominated retiree, he's getting paid, he or she is getting paid €2,000 a month on their pension. >> If I'm right and the purchasing power of the euro declines by 75%, uh that person will need to €8,000 in 10 years to buy what €2,000 buys today. >> And that won't happen. And it's going to it's going to impose a real hardship on people who haven't adequately provisioned for their retirement and people on a fixed income. >> So no tough times ahead. Absolutely. But the world is not burning like a lot of people forecast it as well. So >> there's a lot of opportunity. It's just that you have to seize it. >> You can't be a passive player. uh if you're a passive player, the next 10 years are really, really, really going to hurt. >> Yeah, I like that optimism. I think a lot of people have lost that quite honestly. So, >> listen, 15 years from now, I may be gone. But 15 years from now, I think the world would be better than today. We just got to get there. >> Yeah, >> we still live in a world where five or six kids can take over a garage in Sunnyvale, California, and out pops Google or out pops Apple. And that's important not just because it creates some billionaires, but rather because because of technology, you can add to the wealth of humankind with much lower capital investment than you used to. >> And the really good news, Kai, >> is with social media, with the prevalence of education, that garage, it could be in Logos, it could be in Jakarta, it could be in Sa Paulo, it doesn't have to be in Sunnyvale anymore. That's all really, really, really good. It's just that that macro outlook for the world doesn't disguise the fact that for individuals the next 10 years if they're not careful could be very hard. >> Well, you just got to be diligent and pay attention, right? Um maybe last question. You you were on a panel earlier this morning uh with Ross Speedy and he said we're in a bubble. >> I I didn't see your face, but I was curious what your reaction was to >> I agree completely. I I mean at the show last year I said 2025 is going to be very good. It wouldn't surprise me if portfolios can jump in real quick just to clarify like like bubble always has this like okay this is way too dramatic and it's not just overbought it's just ludicrous like there's a certain negative connotation to it in my opinion over overbought is different so I'm curious >> I think you need to it depends on whether your time frame is 7 years or 2 years or one year >> if your outlook is one year if you assume like I assume that you were going to make 25 or 30% this year and you made 150 or 175 What you did is you used up two or three years worth of growth. Now in my life and even in your life which has been shorter so far, you know that in a bull market you can have a 35% pullback. >> You expect it. >> No, >> most of the people here aren't expecting it. >> People here, if the silver price went from 100 back to 50, they wouldn't think that the silver price went from 20 to 50. they would think it went from 100 to 50. >> Yeah, >> that's that's how you deal. >> But that's overbought versus bubble popping because the bubble popping means complete trend reversion in my opinion >> that we actually go back to $20 an ounce at some point. >> Well, I think probably you I think that's probably a difference of definition. I think if Ross was with us both that he would agree with me. >> Okay, fair enough. Oh, see defin it's a question of difference. Ross uh I know I I can't tell you the exact exact number cuz I don't know it but Ross has several hundred million dollars in this market and aluminum metals I think it's called now as well so down in Poland. So really interesting project there. Um Rick last question and I don't want a name from you but I want to understand like what's the next company you're going to give money to >> or what does it look like? >> Um that's a really good question. I haven't found it yet. Uh on the speculative side, it will almost certainly be a prospect generator. >> Mhm. >> It will be an intellectual capital company. Uh I I like intellectual capital companies. I like companies that leverage their knowledge with other people's money. I like that a lot. >> If it isn't, uh it will likely be a streaming company. Uh I you know subtext I think I think the streaming business will grow more rapidly in the next 10 years than it has in the last 30. A lot of people think that the big transactions are behind. I think the big transactions are ahead. And so I I want to play as big a role in that as I possibly can. My most consistent investments of course will be in Battle Bank. As Battle Bank grows, uh, we will need more capital to grow and, uh, I'd like to maintain my current holdings, which are about 25%. >> Fantastic. Rick, you got a conference coming up in July. I'm really excited. I'm 95% certain I'll be there as well. Really looking forward to that, but give us a bit more of the the highlights. >> Well, you got to work on the five, first of all. Uh, I subtly believe, and you may disagree, being a conference promoter, that I put on all things considered, the finest natural resources conference in the world. It's a great show. >> Uh among other things, uh for exhibiting companies, if we don't own them, they don't get on the floor. So, we vet every single company. That doesn't mean that every stock I own goes up, but it does mean that the qualification for exhibition is more important than simply a check that cashes. We charge every attendee at our conference at admission charge, >> which means that the exhibitors uh are exposed to attendees who aren't there for entertainment purposes. >> And I think that's important. We have a feature that other people including Jay Martin here are copying now called the living legends >> where we have as panelists people who built multi-billion dollar companies from scratch. >> Uh and they talk about the lessons they learned and how that makes them a better investor. This year we're having a panel called the next legends. >> People who are in their 30s and 40s but have had a couple successes who we believe are continual. Traditionally my living legends are my age which means they have limited remaining utility for people your age. So we're trying to identify the people who will be legends for the next 20 years as opposed to the last 20 years. And finally, uh, unlike any other paid conference I know, if you attend my conference and you think for any reason you didn't get your money's worth, I give you your money back. 100% guaranteed. >> Fair enough. Awesome. No, that's a fair deal. Absolutely. And it's a beautiful Book of Raton. >> The only negative comment I'd have, it's a bit muggy outside when you go. But, uh, other than that, >> that turns out to be an advantage. We used to have the conference here in Vancouver in July. >> Yeah. >> At midday, the attendees were tempted to play hookie. They'd walk up Robson Street, have a beer, watch girls. Nobody in their right mind goes out in Florida midday. So it ends up being a better conference venue. >> Absolutely. Absolutely fantastic venue. Absolutely. No, Rick, tremendously appreciate you being here. It's always great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for your time. And uh everybody else, thanks so much for tuning in. Much appreciate you watching Soore Financially here from the floor of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. If you haven't done so, our goal is to reach 100,000 subscribers by the end of this quarter. And with your help, we can do it. So, thanks so much for subscribing. Much appreciated. And uh take care out there.
“Rick Rule: Gold & Silver ‘Turkeys Are Flying’”
Summary
Transcript
Hello and welcome back to Sore Financially here from the floor of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference 2026 in Vancouver. Obviously, my name is Kai Hoffman. I'm the Edj Mining guy over on X and of course your host of this channel. Really looking forward to catching up with an old friend of the channel, Rick Rule. We last spoke in Germany back in uh mid November uh 6 weeks now. What is it now? 8 weeks later. It feels like it's a completely different world yet again. Uh gold at close to $5,000, silver at $100. How's your mood? >> My mood's actually excellent. And before we go on, congratulations on your fine conference. This was my first time. I enjoyed myself. Thank you for hosting me. Thank you for having the tenacity to put on a conference. Uh, you know, the mood is clearly ebulent. Uh, I I I think it's fair to say that this market is a market that's probably ahead of itself. People need to know that. Uh, but I also think it's a market that if your patient has some legs. So there there's a sort of a dichomous answer. Let's dissect it though. Like when you say market, is it the mining market? Is it the mining company valuations? Or is it the gold and silver price? Like >> Yes. Yes. And yes. >> Okay. >> Uh and I don't think there's a one-sizefitsall answer to any of that. I don't suspect that the senior the senior miners are grievously overvalued. If you assume that current commodity prices are a baseline, it's important to note that if the gold price goes from $3,000 to $5,000, that doesn't mean that producers margins go up 40%. It means that producer margins go up 300%. And I think it's important to understand that when you come down the quality trail, however, if you come to the companies around here that are looking for gold, if the price of a commodity you don't have any of goes up, it shouldn't really matter to your valuation, but the valuations go up, too. And in that sense, speculators need to be cautious. >> What do you use as a baseline? Personally, when you do your models and things with your team, do you use spot? >> I use a matrix. Uh, I do I use spot and the forward strip for my base case. I use a 25% discount to that for my stress case and I use a 25% premium to that for my upside case and I compare uh based on deposit efficiency the discrepancy between the downside and the upside. Uh, in other words, do I have positive leverage in an upside scenario to a downside scenario? >> Okay. >> No, I I work pretty hard at this obviously. uh you know a lot of people's technique has got a hunch bet a bunch mine's a bit more sophisticated >> sounds like it absolutely yeah no you definitely proper models behind it but uh >> Rick I want to ask a question I think our audience is waiting for it to get answered and you might have answered it elsewhere as well but uh you you recently said you sold all your silver and you bought silver stocks so run us a bit through the rationale behind that >> that's not quite true I sold 80% of my physical silver >> I kept 20% um and I sold it because silver occupied ies the speculative part of my portfolio. I said in your conference, I save in gold. I maintain liquidity in US dollars and I speculated in physical silver. I bought my s physical silver four or five years ago when it was hated and I bought it specifically because it was hated. My belief was that when the hate wore off that silver would clear up to 50 bucks. I was wrong. It cleared to 75 and beyond that today. in my portfolio when an asset class performs to expectation I sell it. Uh I reallocated the money speculatively too I reallocated it 50% as to silver stocks high quality silver stocks. My rationale was if silver stayed within spitting distance of today's price if it didn't go up for a year the highquality silver stocks would go up by 50 or 60%. So I felt that there was more speculative leverage in the high quality silver stocks than there was in physical silver. >> Absolutely not. >> I also had a 7 figure gain and you haven't I I need to stress that you haven't made the money Kai unless you've taken it. >> Yeah. Paper gains are you worthless. >> Correct. >> Right. Absolutely. No, it makes a lot of sense. Um did you have enough or did you find enough quality silver companies to actually allocate to? Maybe that's the other question here in this >> Yeah. Some of them might be described as silver companies in drag. Uh I consider Wheat and Precious to be a silver company. Uh I consider Pan-American to be a silver company. I consider perhaps erroneously ples and buenura to be silver companies. But for the amount of money I had to allocate, it was fine. I didn't come very far down the quality trail. Uh on the speculative side, I I uh allocated some more to both Abra and Visla Silver, but that's as far down the quality trail I went, which is pretty high. >> Well, they're excellent worldclass developers, right? Absolutely. Like Visa Silver is supposed to be one of the largest silver producers, single asset silver producers if they go into production. So, no, fantastic. Um you mentioned it earlier before we hit the record button that uh not all, you know, trees don't trees don't grow into the sky. There's usually a limit to it at some point. Like what's your assessment of the market right now? Like where are we at? You said overvalued already, but >> it's ahead of itself. >> What could upset the train though? >> This is a re I don't know. I mean, one thing that can upset the train is it simply gets overvalued. >> Uh if you see these uh parabolic charts, the Canadians call them hockey stick charts around silver as an example. I've learned in 50 years in the market that the backside of a hockey stick is just as steep as the front side and much less fun if you're long. So, a lot of people get excited by hockey stick graphs and I get terrified. Uh, you know, I'll just say that I'm an old man. I've been through a lot of markets. Uh, I like to take my money. I I'm in of two positions. I think and I've said this at your conference uh I think over the next 10 years the real purchasing power of the dollar declines by 75%. Which suggests that the gold price in nominal term should do well. I also believe separately that our society has underinvested in productive capacity around industrial materials, copper, oil, things like that for 30 years. There will be supply shortages. So the long-term macro is spectacular. I had an expectation that 2025 would be a good year, which I interpret as a 25 to 30% portfolio gain. I got 150 to 175. That suggests to me that I've used up 3 years of gains in one year. And that tells me that I needed to take some money off the table. >> You underperformed the GDX though. >> Probably. You know what happens in a rampant bull market is that the worst product does the best. And I think you saw that uh what worked for speculators in the last half of 2025 was leverage. By definition, the marginal producers, the high-cost producers are the most leverage. So what really happened is, as Doug Casey says, the turkeys flew, the wind blew, and even the turkeys could fly. >> Yeah. Well, it's the optionality place that everybody's crowding into uh as well. Um what do you make of those like optionality plays? Maybe define that real quick for us as well. Um is it just ounces in the ground or is it really horrible cost structure producers? >> Uh the traditional optionality play in mining has been in a commodity that's priced below the cost of production. If you buy a deposit that isn't economic at current prices, but is economic at a price that the commodity would have to go to for the industry not to be in liquidation. Optionality made me by my standards a boatload of money in the early 90s because after the decade of the 1980s nobody thought resource stocks were going anywhere. So as an example forming silver standard and Pan-American silver we were able to buy deposits that had been they' cost 70 or 80 million to drill off. They made no money at $5 silver. Probably wouldn't make any money till $15 silver. We were able to buy those deposits for 10 cents an ounce. We were able to buy deposits that had cost people 75 million, $80 million to discover. We were able to buy them for 2 million bucks, 3 million bucks. We made so much money in those days that we popularized a whole sector. The difficulty today with optionality is the cover charge. The the market capitalization that you have to pay to participate is way way way too high. For a trader, it still works. For an investor, uh, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I >> I was gonna ask you, isn't the whole sector an optionality player right now? Like it feels like every asset is all of a sudden super economic. I wouldn't have touched some of the companies at 24 $2,500 gold at 48 5,000 like everything seems to be great. >> I think ironically now the optionality goes the other way. Uh I think that some of the higher quality producing companies with less single company risk, single deposit risk, uh in the silver business as an example are priced to discount $45 silver. If we maintain $80 silver, the market will begin to redo net present value calculations using 80 as a baseline as opposed to 40 and those stocks will rerate. That isn't thousand% optionality, but it is lowrisk double. And a lowrisisk double is pretty good. >> No, absolutely. Because that's many of the bank analysts like Raymond James or like RBC, they still use much lower long-term price forecasts. And I think that's the opportunity as well. >> And there's a near-term opportunity, Kai, that you need to pay attention to. Right now, you know, the earning season comes in really soon, two weeks, three weeks. >> February 19th, I think, new month usually kicks it off, I believe. So the Bay Street analysts and the Wall Street analysts as you point out uh are making their earnings forecast based on 32 or 30 $3 to $300 gold. If you're new, you're selling the stuff for 45 and the earnings calls predicated on 3,300. How do you not have a surprise? >> Yeah. Q Q4 gold average I think was 4150 by my calculations. So >> So if they're selling the stuff for $600 more than their forecast, it's going to be if they don't have a surprise, that's going to be a surprise. Absolutely. Now the market is oblivious to it I think as still so there's still opportunity left of course um I've been asked that and I want to come back to this like is there anything that could upset the train card here that really >> first of all overvaluation that's the first thing I mean there's a lot of stocks that are ahead of themselves >> in the junior sector uh you know we all make fun of governments Kai counterfeiting >> there's nobody who counterfeits as well as the junior mining sector I mean in terms of in terms of selling overpriced valueless paper. >> Yeah. >> The private sector always outco competes the public sector. Yeah. >> And everybody and their brothers raising money now >> and if you agree with my thesis, which I've talked about in your show before, >> that 85% of these companies are valueless, >> if they raise money at any price, it's accretive to them and dilutive to you. >> At some point in time, the creation of new shares overwhelms the money available to buy those shares, and you get a near-term collapse. And that's going to happen. I mean, how how many previous tripledigit GDXJ years have we seen? >> I can't remember too many to be honest. And uh it's it's been a while for me at least. So, um talking about it, let's stay on that topic. You you're always been big on like the sector's overfunded. So, we got over 1400 companies in Canada alone seeking capital and we raised record amounts last year. Uh it wasn't 2011 levels yet, but uh we're we're getting there. it feels like 2026 has the the pedigree to reach those levels. Um, how do you look at things now? Like when you'd say, "Okay, these these these dog companies are still printing shares." Um, like but how do you differentiate it now? Like >> I I ignore them basically. Uh, I if I was generous, if there were 1,400 public mining companies in Canada, I would suggest that probably as many as 250 were not valueless, but the rest are valueless. They're completely valueless. So, if a company doesn't have a team that has been successful in the past, I don't want to know. I just don't want to know. If the company isn't involved in an activity that I can understand that will generate real value, not some junky little mind, but real value, I don't want to know. When I go to the booth and I say to the management team, tell me your most important unanswered question. Tell me how you can increase the market's knowledge of your project project in a way that's meaningful. 80% of the time that I ask the question, the manager says to me, well, I've never thought about it that way. which is to suggest that uh these companies don't have a plan. >> Yeah. >> It's very difficult Kai to get somewhere if you don't have a plan. >> Exactly. >> Can you imagine yourself coming from Frankfurt to Vancouver with no itinerary? >> It would be to be honest. It'd be very liberating. But uh I know what you mean. >> I wouldn't want to watch it. >> No, no, I I hear you though. But uh >> in this sector like $7 billion roughly raised last year, right? And but the the junior end like the companies without only or with only a concept, >> right, >> are still suffering mercifully, >> right? So so maybe like just trying to get to understand like where are we in this cycle right now? >> When when my friend Ross Bey has a concept, he funds it himself. When Robert Freiedland has a concept, he funds it himself. When Bob Quain has a concept, he funds it itself. When it gets derisked enough that they can attract funds at a premium, then they go public. When the lame, the halt, and the blind have a concept, they haven't been successful in the past, so they can't fund it themselves, and they try to sell that to me based on the fact that they can't fund it. Well, that to me isn't to virtue. >> Can I ask you a pointed question actually? Like, we've talked about it like Kendall, Ze Ze Flood, like you you talked about him on our show before. Um, would you have funded him when he started his company? >> I didn't fund him when he started his company. Uh, although I did business with his dad for three decades, I didn't fund him when he started his company. There are people like my good friend John Tognetti who do that. There are people like John Toggnetti who have enough sense of their ability to judge people that they'll take the risk on a Zach Flood at a nickel and they're perfectly happy to lose the nickel knowing that one time in five they back the right guy and they turn that nickel into a buck 75. >> That's not my game. >> $330 right now. So 38 point. Yeah. >> No, absolutely. Um you know we're we're overwhelmed here. There's a ton of mining companies, exploration companies around us here as well. How do you maintain discipline? >> That's easy for me. Uh I'm old first of all. Uh all of the mistakes that these people will probably be making for the first time, I made the decade of the 70s. Uh and those mistakes are still fresh in my mind. Uh in that first bull market when I was a very young man, I played the game hard. I was here. I was knowledgeable. I was personable. And I made by a young man's standards a lot of money. And I made it at a time when other people in financial services in a bare market were losing money. I made the mistake then of confusing a bull market with brains. And I went from being a very wealthy young man to having a negative net worth. Uh and that lesson stuck with me. It'll never happen to me again. I buy hate. I sell love. Love is on offer here. So, I'm a seller. >> There's a lot of love here. Absolutely. A lot of hugging. I see. So, absolutely. Um, no. Rick, and I know I sort of bit of a rhetorical question because I know the answer, I think, is is really like how do you deal with FOMO as well? You see stocks going up left, right, and center? I don't have it. >> You don't have it? >> No. I mean, I I got a lot of faults. >> No. >> Uh, I'm too fat. I drink too much. >> Fo FOMO. >> No, >> that's not one. Okay. >> Uh, I sold my silver at uh probably average 75 bucks, went to 100. I'm glad the guy made the last 25. I don't care. I made from 20 to 75 in my pock. Well, pre-tax in my pocket. That's great. I, you know, I bought silver because I could I thought it could go to 50. >> It went to 75 instead. I think your audience needs to understand that there are two primary forms of mistake errors. One is the error of omission where you miss out on some of what you could have made or you didn't buy something that went up. The other is errors of commission where you lose money. Errors of omission are better than errors of commission. >> That makes a lot of sense. And paying commission to the broker who actually put you into that deal, right? Absolutely. Um Rick, you were on the show and maybe switching gears just a little bit and you said, "Well, I don't want to see gold at $5,000 cuz that means the world is in deep deep dudoo." Um are we in deep deep dudoo? >> We are. I mean, don't get me wrong, we're going to get through this. But the next 10 years are going to be a lot more challenging than the last 40 were. What the $5,000 gold price is telling you is what I've been saying on your show for four or five years, which is to suggest that fiat currencies, almost all of them, will lose a substantial amount of their purchasing power over the next 10 years. And that real interest rates are negative. That the money that you make on a euro denominated bond or a dollar denominated bond is less than the rate of inflation. Um, that's a lousy outcome. The period 1982 to 2022 was probably the most benign financial climate in human history. And people are still tra still trained to expect benign climate. And the next 10 years, if I'm right about the decline in purchasing power of fiat currencies, will be much less benign. If you think about uh you live in in Germany, so a Euro zone denominated retiree, he's getting paid, he or she is getting paid €2,000 a month on their pension. >> If I'm right and the purchasing power of the euro declines by 75%, uh that person will need to €8,000 in 10 years to buy what €2,000 buys today. >> And that won't happen. And it's going to it's going to impose a real hardship on people who haven't adequately provisioned for their retirement and people on a fixed income. >> So no tough times ahead. Absolutely. But the world is not burning like a lot of people forecast it as well. So >> there's a lot of opportunity. It's just that you have to seize it. >> You can't be a passive player. uh if you're a passive player, the next 10 years are really, really, really going to hurt. >> Yeah, I like that optimism. I think a lot of people have lost that quite honestly. So, >> listen, 15 years from now, I may be gone. But 15 years from now, I think the world would be better than today. We just got to get there. >> Yeah, >> we still live in a world where five or six kids can take over a garage in Sunnyvale, California, and out pops Google or out pops Apple. And that's important not just because it creates some billionaires, but rather because because of technology, you can add to the wealth of humankind with much lower capital investment than you used to. >> And the really good news, Kai, >> is with social media, with the prevalence of education, that garage, it could be in Logos, it could be in Jakarta, it could be in Sa Paulo, it doesn't have to be in Sunnyvale anymore. That's all really, really, really good. It's just that that macro outlook for the world doesn't disguise the fact that for individuals the next 10 years if they're not careful could be very hard. >> Well, you just got to be diligent and pay attention, right? Um maybe last question. You you were on a panel earlier this morning uh with Ross Speedy and he said we're in a bubble. >> I I didn't see your face, but I was curious what your reaction was to >> I agree completely. I I mean at the show last year I said 2025 is going to be very good. It wouldn't surprise me if portfolios can jump in real quick just to clarify like like bubble always has this like okay this is way too dramatic and it's not just overbought it's just ludicrous like there's a certain negative connotation to it in my opinion over overbought is different so I'm curious >> I think you need to it depends on whether your time frame is 7 years or 2 years or one year >> if your outlook is one year if you assume like I assume that you were going to make 25 or 30% this year and you made 150 or 175 What you did is you used up two or three years worth of growth. Now in my life and even in your life which has been shorter so far, you know that in a bull market you can have a 35% pullback. >> You expect it. >> No, >> most of the people here aren't expecting it. >> People here, if the silver price went from 100 back to 50, they wouldn't think that the silver price went from 20 to 50. they would think it went from 100 to 50. >> Yeah, >> that's that's how you deal. >> But that's overbought versus bubble popping because the bubble popping means complete trend reversion in my opinion >> that we actually go back to $20 an ounce at some point. >> Well, I think probably you I think that's probably a difference of definition. I think if Ross was with us both that he would agree with me. >> Okay, fair enough. Oh, see defin it's a question of difference. Ross uh I know I I can't tell you the exact exact number cuz I don't know it but Ross has several hundred million dollars in this market and aluminum metals I think it's called now as well so down in Poland. So really interesting project there. Um Rick last question and I don't want a name from you but I want to understand like what's the next company you're going to give money to >> or what does it look like? >> Um that's a really good question. I haven't found it yet. Uh on the speculative side, it will almost certainly be a prospect generator. >> Mhm. >> It will be an intellectual capital company. Uh I I like intellectual capital companies. I like companies that leverage their knowledge with other people's money. I like that a lot. >> If it isn't, uh it will likely be a streaming company. Uh I you know subtext I think I think the streaming business will grow more rapidly in the next 10 years than it has in the last 30. A lot of people think that the big transactions are behind. I think the big transactions are ahead. And so I I want to play as big a role in that as I possibly can. My most consistent investments of course will be in Battle Bank. As Battle Bank grows, uh, we will need more capital to grow and, uh, I'd like to maintain my current holdings, which are about 25%. >> Fantastic. Rick, you got a conference coming up in July. I'm really excited. I'm 95% certain I'll be there as well. Really looking forward to that, but give us a bit more of the the highlights. >> Well, you got to work on the five, first of all. Uh, I subtly believe, and you may disagree, being a conference promoter, that I put on all things considered, the finest natural resources conference in the world. It's a great show. >> Uh among other things, uh for exhibiting companies, if we don't own them, they don't get on the floor. So, we vet every single company. That doesn't mean that every stock I own goes up, but it does mean that the qualification for exhibition is more important than simply a check that cashes. We charge every attendee at our conference at admission charge, >> which means that the exhibitors uh are exposed to attendees who aren't there for entertainment purposes. >> And I think that's important. We have a feature that other people including Jay Martin here are copying now called the living legends >> where we have as panelists people who built multi-billion dollar companies from scratch. >> Uh and they talk about the lessons they learned and how that makes them a better investor. This year we're having a panel called the next legends. >> People who are in their 30s and 40s but have had a couple successes who we believe are continual. Traditionally my living legends are my age which means they have limited remaining utility for people your age. So we're trying to identify the people who will be legends for the next 20 years as opposed to the last 20 years. And finally, uh, unlike any other paid conference I know, if you attend my conference and you think for any reason you didn't get your money's worth, I give you your money back. 100% guaranteed. >> Fair enough. Awesome. No, that's a fair deal. Absolutely. And it's a beautiful Book of Raton. >> The only negative comment I'd have, it's a bit muggy outside when you go. But, uh, other than that, >> that turns out to be an advantage. We used to have the conference here in Vancouver in July. >> Yeah. >> At midday, the attendees were tempted to play hookie. They'd walk up Robson Street, have a beer, watch girls. Nobody in their right mind goes out in Florida midday. So it ends up being a better conference venue. >> Absolutely. Absolutely fantastic venue. Absolutely. No, Rick, tremendously appreciate you being here. It's always great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for your time. And uh everybody else, thanks so much for tuning in. Much appreciate you watching Soore Financially here from the floor of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. If you haven't done so, our goal is to reach 100,000 subscribers by the end of this quarter. And with your help, we can do it. So, thanks so much for subscribing. Much appreciated. And uh take care out there.