Rick Rule: Oil/Gas Move is Inevitable, but Copper is Next Bull Market
Summary
Portfolio Moves: Rick Rule sold most of his physical silver after a parabolic move and redeployed into high-quality silver miners, physical gold, and oil & gas equities.
Silver Stocks: He argues top-tier silver producers should re-rate as the market shifts from discounting $45 silver to $75–$80, offering 50–70% upside even if silver stays flat.
Stock Selection: Recent outperformance skewed to higher-cost names (e.g., First Majestic, Santa Cruz, Endeavour Silver), while quality producers and brand names like Hecla and Coeur have lagged but still did well.
Oil & Gas Outlook: He’s building a beta-centric portfolio tilted to majors, expecting the thesis to play out over 2–2.5 years, with key risks being global recession or geopolitical peace that restores supply.
Copper Thesis: Structural deficits, multiple mine outages, and a $250B capex need suggest a coiled-spring setup despite muted prices for much of the year.
Uranium Juniors: Shift from spot to term contracting enables bank financing; only a handful of juniors have meaningful resources, so cost position and ROCE discipline are crucial.
Precious Metals Discipline: He saves in gold and is likely exiting platinum/palladium after an 80% rise, emphasizing a “buy hate, sell love” framework and preference for large caps over juniors given current valuations.
Transcript
I'm Charlotte Mloud at investingnews.com and here today with me is Rick Rule, proprietor at rural Investment Media. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> A pleasure, Charlotte. Thank you for all these years of fun and fine interviews. I've appreciated the questions you've asked. >> Well, me as well. I've appreciated the answers. I know that our audience has as well. And of course, as usual, I brought some audience questions with me, but where I thought we should start is with silver. So, major milestone just a couple of days ago for silver getting to that triple digit level. And I've been watching your your talking elsewhere online. You mentioned that you've sold 80% I think of your physical silver and you've we'll talk about what you did with that money, but I want to talk into or talk about the selling uh first because I think a lot of people are wondering right now is it the time to sell? So, how did you make that decision? >> I think it's an individual decision first of all. Uh you know, it's important to note that I'm an old and fairly good speculator and one of the keys of my success has been real discipline. I bought that silver in the $20 range and I bought it because silver was deeply out of favor. It was hated. I remember actually having conversations with you about the fact that the hate that silver enjoyed guaranteed it was going to go up. And I bought it in anticipation that the hate would subside and that when the hate subsided that the price would go up. My price target was 50. I was wrong. I went to 75. Uh, and when that happened, the reasons that I own the position went away. In my life, when the reasons to own a position goes away, the position goes away. Uh, the other thing, Charlotte, is I've seen in my life a lot of parabolic stock charts. Canadians call them hockey stick charts. The back side of a hockey stick is just as steep as the front side, and it's a lot less fun. I didn't know where that stick would end and I didn't care. >> So, was 75 was that your level that you said, "Okay, now it's time to go." >> No, I was too lazy to do it at 50. I was doing other things. I mean, to be honest with you, uh, I procrastinated and it wasn't because I thought I would go higher. I actually procrastinated. We're in the process, as you know, of opening a bank. Uh, and that has kept me very, very, very busy. And the process of opening a bank was more important to me than the process of selling my silver. So, by the time I got around to it, the the price had gone up. Had I procrastinated another week, I would have got more money. >> But none of that matters. I don't have any fear of missing out. I've I've made plenty in my life. Uh and one of the reasons why I've kept it through good markets and bad is the discipline that allowed me to sell that silver even when other people were buying. >> Yeah. I think a a theme certainly people I've been talking to today is they don't have that FOMO. And I think that's certainly very helpful. And just to be clear on silver, so we could go higher from here. It's just that you don't mind not being in that anymore. >> I think we will go higher. I'm not sure we'll go higher soon. You may recall in an interview that we did some years ago. I described silver as a coiled spring. A lot of the tension's out of that spring. Now, the thesis is valid today, but the thesis doesn't have as much value at $100 silver as it did at 20 because some of the price move that had to happen happened. Uh, and I felt for the speculative part of my portfolio, there was better homes for the money than silver. >> Well, and I think that's certainly what everybody would like to know if they don't know already is where did that money from silver go into? >> I did three things. Uh the first is that I took about half the money, not quite half the money, but about half the money and I put it in high high quality silver stocks. My reasoning being as follows. If silver goes nowhere for a year, if it stays rangebound, the best silver producers are discounting $45 silver. A year from now, if the price is at 75 or 80, they'll be discounting 75 or $80 silver, which means the stock will be up 50, 60, 70%. The speculative outlook for the silver stocks seem to be better than the speculative outcome for silver. Silver stays flat for a year, by definition, silver won't give me any return, but if it stays flat, the silver stocks will give me 50 or 60%. So, it was a better speculative outcome. The second thing I did was about 25% of the money went into physical gold. That's how I save. I maintain liquidity in US currency and I save in gold. Was gold a better speculation at 2,000 than at 4500? Absolutely. But that's how I save. Uh and I took 25% of the money and I put it in oil and gas stocks. As you know, Charlotte, uh my motto is that I buy hate and I sell love. Silver was loved, so I sold it. oil and gas were hated, so I bought it. >> Okay. Well, we'll unpack a little bit more about what's going on there. Let's start with the the silver stocks. So, 50% of the money went into buying silver stocks. Are you able to mention any names? >> Happy to. And some of them are silver stocks in drag. Um, wheat and precious started a silver Weaten. Still got an important silver constituency. So, I bought silver wheat and second highest quality precious metals mining company in the world. I bought Pan-American, used to be Pan-American silver, huge leverage to silver, including two different 500 million ounce deposits that aren't in production for political reasons. I think $80 silver, $90 silver, and the potential government take on those deposits eliminates the political opposition, and it's on the balance sheet for free. I bought uh Industri Panles, which is a not well-known but very large Mexican mining company, the company that controls Fresno. Uh and then I bought two silver juniors, uh Abra, very high quality junior uh and Visla silver so that I could get a little sizzle in the portfolio. >> Well, thank you very much for sharing. And a question I'm seeing from our audience frequently right now is all right, we've had this huge move in silver. When did the silver stocks start outperforming? And of course, it's not to say they haven't moved or that some haven't outperformed already, but any thoughts? >> What's happened interestingly is that uh the silver stocks that have performed have been the more marginal ones. Now there's some rationale for that. If the silver price increases, ironically, the less efficient companies generate higher margin growth because they had low margins, high cost to begin with. So if you look at the performance in First Majestic, big silver producer, but not a lowc cost producer or better yet Santa Cruz Silver or Endeavor Silver, not the highest quality silver producers in the world, but the ones with the most leverage, those stocks have been on fire. the higher quality silver producers which have less margin expansion because they're more efficient have lagged. But overall uh you know if you look at a couple stocks I don't own cordelane and heckla sort of brand names in silver historically not great capital allocators middle of the road in costs they've done pretty well. And if we look over at the oil stocks, so we talked back in November about companies that you had bought in oil and I would direct people back to that interview to get those names. Did you go further into those names you already had or were there other places you went when it came to oil? >> No, I went back into those names. Um, I I made my uh reputation and my living earlier when I was younger buying smaller companies that sold at substantial valuation disparities, pricetoval deltas to the majors. What's happened in this market is that the valuation disparities are much less obvious which is to say the big companies have better pricetovalue relationships at least ranked qualitatively than the small ones. So rather than a portfolio that I would have assembled when say I was your age uh the portfolio that I've assembled in the oil stocks now is a very betacentric portfolio. It's the exxons of the world you know. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think I'm starting to hear more and more people talk about this rotation from precious metals over to oil. I want to ask, so you're looking at oil longterm and I think people are curious about where the sector is going to go. We've had the the Venezuela situation unfolding. Is there is there a bare case for oil that you can see or does it all look pretty positive? >> No, there's there's two bare cases. One I hope occurs actually, which is to say peace. Uh, I would love to see Iranian society resolve their internal complaint, you know, conflicts without too many people dying. I'd love to see that. Uh, it would take Iran five or six years to reinvest enough sustaining capital to restore their oil business. I would live to see peace break out between Russia and the Ukraine which would after five or six years allow for the resumption of large quantity oil exports from Russia. I would love to see a resolution of whatever disputes are holding back Venezuela. Um, in my lifetime, uh, the hope for peace and an end to political disputes has been often a fleeting hope. >> Yeah. >> Uh, but I I would love to see it. I'd love to be wrong in my oil thesis as a consequence of humankind being healthier. That would be great. >> Yeah. Um, the other thing that scares me is it's been a very long time, Charlotte, since we had a good thorough recession, never mind depression. And if we had a synchronized global recession, particularly one that was accompanied by a crisis in confidence, aka a 2008 style event, something that really shook people. You can have loyal lower supplies, which we will have in oil, absent peace. if demand falls and you still don't go to price rise. So those are the two bare cases that I can see uh a synchronized global recession or depression a bad thing by any estimation or peace a good thing by any estimation. >> Yeah, two two very different cases there. And maybe I'll I'll follow you down that recession path a little bit further because it's something I've been talking about I feel for years at these events. When are we going to have that recession come? and it seems to be it's just been staved off and staved off. Do you anticipate that coming to a head? How how are you seeing it? >> I'm surprised we haven't seen it so far and I think I understand what's happening. I think uh I think that we've been through 40 years of very benign economic climate and I think that people are preconditioned yeah >> to be confident. People's actions in the future are often determined by their experience in the immediate past and most people's experience in the last 40 years been pretty good. You know uh the second thing is that I think that people like me underestimate the impact of technology on the economy and the ability through techn technology to generate more GDP growth with less capital expenditure. I would have expected 10 years ago that the level of government expenditure in Canada in the United States that we would have seen would have done a more thorough job of driving private capital out of the market. But one consequence of technology is that the private side of our economy, not the government side, the private side of our economy has been able as a consequence of technology to do a lot more with less. We'll continue to see that that will become increasingly political unpop politically unpopular. Let's say that you are a low-sklls worker, but you can get by living five to a house with a job at McDonald's, paying $20 an hour. McDonald's is highly likely to automate your job away. Uh McDonald's in the future, rather than having 40 $20 an hour workers, is going to have four $60 an hour workers who are machinery technicians. From the economy's point of view, this is very good thing. From the point of view of somebody who eats at McDonald's, this is a very good thing because it'll moderate their price increases. From the point of view of the 36 employees that get laid off, this is a very bad thing. >> I can Yeah, I can definitely see what you're saying there. And I wonder if we go back to looking at the commodities, how you're approaching this. If you were looking at your portfolio, how how do you think it breaks down in terms of percentage by commodity? At this point, >> I don't know. Um, I'm probably overweight precious metals still because I was so overweighted. Uh, uh, I'm overweight copper because I've been overweight copper my whole life. I'm a little underweight iron because I had expected the economy to be worse and iron to sell off. It didn't happen. Um, I'm way underweight oil and gas from where I would like to be. I mean that's where the additions will be taking place. What's really changed in my economy is the composition not by commodity but rather by market cap. uh in this market for whatever reason as we discussed earlier the valuation disparities in the juniors price to value uh have been unattractive relative to the majors and so very unlike the portfolio I would have assembled when I was your age which was a different market. My portfolio now is more betacentric. Uh I'm less willing to take the single company risk because the valuation incentives to do so don't strike me as being particularly evident. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes sense and it goes back to that individualized approach once again. And one one question I'm trying to ask people at this event is okay, we know that gold and silver are having their their time to shine right now. What is the the next bull market that you see coming? Would it be oil and gas? >> No, I think oil and gas is two years out, two and a half years out. It's just such a certain event that I'm willing to take the time risk. You may recall in earlier interviews I talked about the difference between inevitable something that had to happen and imminent which means it has to happen soon. I don't know the time side. I just know it has to happen. If I looked at across the commodity spectrum at risktore reward uh I would probably urge people to look at copper. The copper price has done pretty well but it should have done much better this year. It should have done much better because we have a structural supply deficit and Cobra Panama came out of production, Cula came out of production, Grass Per came out of production and Kodelco had production halts at three mines. We had 7% of world supply come out of production in a market that was already under supplied. In a normal market, uh, a market that wasn't perhaps recession tampered, one would have expected a 20 or 25% price increase as a consequence of that production decline, which we didn't see. So, I think copper has a bit of a coiled spring aspect to it, too. Some of the tension certainly in the last four weeks has been unwound. Copper's done fairly well, but for most of the year, copper seemed really strangely uh muted in terms of price increase. And make no mistake, a supply shortfall absolutely inevitable in copper. >> Right. Okay. And so the supply shortfall for copper is at this point it's outweighing that economic recession type of concern. >> Yep. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong forever. I'm wrong till the end of the recession and I've been wrong that time many times in my career but you know I was uh I was in London at mining week and uh I heard a really interesting paper I think it was by Wood McKenzie where they pulled the biggest copper mining companies in the world and they said that the copper industry needs to spend $250 billion in the next 10 years to maintain current production. current production's in deficit. The problem is that demand is growing at almost 2% compounded. So, we're going to spend $250 billion dollars, 150 of which we don't have, to maintain production uh at a level that isn't quite sufficient to meet current demand while demand increases. They could be wrong by a fair bit and still have a positive outlook. I also I want to bring you a another viewer question. This one is on platinum and we've talked about platinum palladium in past years and you were interested. You were doing research on what was going on there. Are they still of interest to you right now? >> Much less interest. I couldn't find uh I I couldn't find any platinum seniors to buy. Uh despite the fact that Sabani is run by a good friend of mine, uh the political risk seemed extreme. I did buy a couple platinum juniors and I bought some Sprat physical platinum and palladium trust because I couldn't find another way to express my preference. The platinum price now is up by what 80%. Uh I'm probably going to sell that fairly soon for the same reason I sold my silver. I bought it because platinum was priced at less than the cost of production and I thought it had to go up by 50%. And instead it went up by 80%. So for me, if the reason to own something goes away, the position has to go away. >> Yeah. Yeah. That recurring theme again. And I want to I'll throw in one on uranium as well. And this one is more for me because I get to moderate a panel tomorrow on the outlook for small cap uranium companies. So that'll be interesting. But I was thinking back to when we talked in November and you had mentioned, you know, if people want exposure to uranium, they can just buy Camo. So is there a case for you at this point or in the future for the small cap uranium stocks? Again, >> depends on how hard somebody wants to work. uh the structural market outlook, which is to say the movement of the market for physical uranium from a spot market where prices are indeterminate to a term market is hugely beneficial for the juniors. There's no other mineral resource commodity in the world where a junior can lock in price and terms for the commodity over 10 years. And that means that they can get bank financing which they couldn't have gotten five years ago. The difficulty with that thesis is that of out of 120 uranium juniors worldwide, there's probably only six or seven that have enough uranium to bother with. So you have to be very careful about the rapper that you express your preference for the juniors in you. If you come into a junior and they spend their whole presentation talking to you about the uranium market, time to leave. You need to ask them where they sit uh in the production cost, you know, profile. Are they in the best cile worldwide? Where they sit in return on capital employed? In other words, are they going to get built against their competitors? Um, you know, it's it's important to ask these questions. It's important to ask them. A lot of them are going to say, "We have great leverage to uranium because we don't have a contract signed." What that means is they can't finance. If you don't have a contract signed and the banker doesn't know that he or she's going to get paid back, they won't lend the money. So, what they're holding out to you to be a virtue is in fact a vice. It's important that you know that. It's important when you interview juniors that you determine whether or not they have any economic deposits of uranium. If the price of something that you don't have any of goes up, it should not impact your value that much. It might impact your price, but not your value. >> Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. Can be very tricky. All right, we we need to start wrapping up so I can get you back out onto the show floor, but is is it too early to ask you about the rule symposium coming up in July? >> It's absolutely not. I know you're at a at a competing symposium, so you can't you can't praise my symposium too eloquently, but I think we have all things considered the finest natural resource conference on the planet. Uh we did a great job last year. We made our attendees a lot of money. The consequence of that is that applications for admission to this year's show are running triple what they were last year's level. If you want to come uh make your decision fairly quickly. M Why might you come? Well, I think we do a very good job with big picture macro among other things. telling uh our viewers the way the world really is, not the way that CNBC or Fox would like you to believe it is. Uh every exhibitor, our show is vetted. The qualifications to be an exhibitor at most conferences is a check that cashed and at our conference you have to be owned in my portfolio. Doesn't guarantee that your stock goes up, but it does guarantee that I vetted you. We have a wonderful feature called the living legends where we interview on stage people who have built several multi-billion dollar companies to learn how they did it and to learn how their in how their life experience can make them a better investor and more importantly you a better investor. This year we're adding a new feature for folks your age something called the next legends. rather than just pulling on stage Robert Frerieden and Bob Quartermain and Robert you know Bob uh you know Bob Dickinson, Rick Rule, all these old dinosaurs. Uh we're bringing on some of the people in their 40s and 50s who've had enough success that you know they're going to be successful in the future but have the legs to be worth investing in for the next 20 years. Nobody's done this before. Uh finally uh at our conference whether you attend live or live stream you have access to the conference recordings for a year because we give you 46 hours of programming in 4 days which is more than you can absorb to get your money's worth. You you need to play the tapes. I put on the conference I have to play the tapes. And if after all that you think for any reason that you didn't get you your money's worth I'll give you your money back. This is the only money back guarantee in the conference business, which is important. We've only had a refund about onetenth of 1% of the money we charged. Last year, we had 1,400 online attendees. We had three refund requests, which will tell you that we did a pretty good job. But that that guarantee is your guarantee that we're highly confident in our programming. >> Well, certainly something to look forward to. We'll have the link in the video description for people to check out if they would like to. And I'll let you go unless you had any final thoughts for investors. >> Only if you might want to go uh get in the hotel room block with uh reservations running 3 to one ahead of last year. Our room block uh which saves you a lot of money on the hotel will run out this year. We will sell out of hotel rooms. >> Okay. Well, good reminder for for me as well. So, thank you and thank you. Thank you very much for coming on to talk about what's going on. Always appreciated. >> Pleasure. Thank you for a decade of great interviews. >> Of course. Thank you. Once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investing.com and this is Rick Rule.
Rick Rule: Oil/Gas Move is Inevitable, but Copper is Next Bull Market
Summary
Transcript
I'm Charlotte Mloud at investingnews.com and here today with me is Rick Rule, proprietor at rural Investment Media. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> A pleasure, Charlotte. Thank you for all these years of fun and fine interviews. I've appreciated the questions you've asked. >> Well, me as well. I've appreciated the answers. I know that our audience has as well. And of course, as usual, I brought some audience questions with me, but where I thought we should start is with silver. So, major milestone just a couple of days ago for silver getting to that triple digit level. And I've been watching your your talking elsewhere online. You mentioned that you've sold 80% I think of your physical silver and you've we'll talk about what you did with that money, but I want to talk into or talk about the selling uh first because I think a lot of people are wondering right now is it the time to sell? So, how did you make that decision? >> I think it's an individual decision first of all. Uh you know, it's important to note that I'm an old and fairly good speculator and one of the keys of my success has been real discipline. I bought that silver in the $20 range and I bought it because silver was deeply out of favor. It was hated. I remember actually having conversations with you about the fact that the hate that silver enjoyed guaranteed it was going to go up. And I bought it in anticipation that the hate would subside and that when the hate subsided that the price would go up. My price target was 50. I was wrong. I went to 75. Uh, and when that happened, the reasons that I own the position went away. In my life, when the reasons to own a position goes away, the position goes away. Uh, the other thing, Charlotte, is I've seen in my life a lot of parabolic stock charts. Canadians call them hockey stick charts. The back side of a hockey stick is just as steep as the front side, and it's a lot less fun. I didn't know where that stick would end and I didn't care. >> So, was 75 was that your level that you said, "Okay, now it's time to go." >> No, I was too lazy to do it at 50. I was doing other things. I mean, to be honest with you, uh, I procrastinated and it wasn't because I thought I would go higher. I actually procrastinated. We're in the process, as you know, of opening a bank. Uh, and that has kept me very, very, very busy. And the process of opening a bank was more important to me than the process of selling my silver. So, by the time I got around to it, the the price had gone up. Had I procrastinated another week, I would have got more money. >> But none of that matters. I don't have any fear of missing out. I've I've made plenty in my life. Uh and one of the reasons why I've kept it through good markets and bad is the discipline that allowed me to sell that silver even when other people were buying. >> Yeah. I think a a theme certainly people I've been talking to today is they don't have that FOMO. And I think that's certainly very helpful. And just to be clear on silver, so we could go higher from here. It's just that you don't mind not being in that anymore. >> I think we will go higher. I'm not sure we'll go higher soon. You may recall in an interview that we did some years ago. I described silver as a coiled spring. A lot of the tension's out of that spring. Now, the thesis is valid today, but the thesis doesn't have as much value at $100 silver as it did at 20 because some of the price move that had to happen happened. Uh, and I felt for the speculative part of my portfolio, there was better homes for the money than silver. >> Well, and I think that's certainly what everybody would like to know if they don't know already is where did that money from silver go into? >> I did three things. Uh the first is that I took about half the money, not quite half the money, but about half the money and I put it in high high quality silver stocks. My reasoning being as follows. If silver goes nowhere for a year, if it stays rangebound, the best silver producers are discounting $45 silver. A year from now, if the price is at 75 or 80, they'll be discounting 75 or $80 silver, which means the stock will be up 50, 60, 70%. The speculative outlook for the silver stocks seem to be better than the speculative outcome for silver. Silver stays flat for a year, by definition, silver won't give me any return, but if it stays flat, the silver stocks will give me 50 or 60%. So, it was a better speculative outcome. The second thing I did was about 25% of the money went into physical gold. That's how I save. I maintain liquidity in US currency and I save in gold. Was gold a better speculation at 2,000 than at 4500? Absolutely. But that's how I save. Uh and I took 25% of the money and I put it in oil and gas stocks. As you know, Charlotte, uh my motto is that I buy hate and I sell love. Silver was loved, so I sold it. oil and gas were hated, so I bought it. >> Okay. Well, we'll unpack a little bit more about what's going on there. Let's start with the the silver stocks. So, 50% of the money went into buying silver stocks. Are you able to mention any names? >> Happy to. And some of them are silver stocks in drag. Um, wheat and precious started a silver Weaten. Still got an important silver constituency. So, I bought silver wheat and second highest quality precious metals mining company in the world. I bought Pan-American, used to be Pan-American silver, huge leverage to silver, including two different 500 million ounce deposits that aren't in production for political reasons. I think $80 silver, $90 silver, and the potential government take on those deposits eliminates the political opposition, and it's on the balance sheet for free. I bought uh Industri Panles, which is a not well-known but very large Mexican mining company, the company that controls Fresno. Uh and then I bought two silver juniors, uh Abra, very high quality junior uh and Visla silver so that I could get a little sizzle in the portfolio. >> Well, thank you very much for sharing. And a question I'm seeing from our audience frequently right now is all right, we've had this huge move in silver. When did the silver stocks start outperforming? And of course, it's not to say they haven't moved or that some haven't outperformed already, but any thoughts? >> What's happened interestingly is that uh the silver stocks that have performed have been the more marginal ones. Now there's some rationale for that. If the silver price increases, ironically, the less efficient companies generate higher margin growth because they had low margins, high cost to begin with. So if you look at the performance in First Majestic, big silver producer, but not a lowc cost producer or better yet Santa Cruz Silver or Endeavor Silver, not the highest quality silver producers in the world, but the ones with the most leverage, those stocks have been on fire. the higher quality silver producers which have less margin expansion because they're more efficient have lagged. But overall uh you know if you look at a couple stocks I don't own cordelane and heckla sort of brand names in silver historically not great capital allocators middle of the road in costs they've done pretty well. And if we look over at the oil stocks, so we talked back in November about companies that you had bought in oil and I would direct people back to that interview to get those names. Did you go further into those names you already had or were there other places you went when it came to oil? >> No, I went back into those names. Um, I I made my uh reputation and my living earlier when I was younger buying smaller companies that sold at substantial valuation disparities, pricetoval deltas to the majors. What's happened in this market is that the valuation disparities are much less obvious which is to say the big companies have better pricetovalue relationships at least ranked qualitatively than the small ones. So rather than a portfolio that I would have assembled when say I was your age uh the portfolio that I've assembled in the oil stocks now is a very betacentric portfolio. It's the exxons of the world you know. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think I'm starting to hear more and more people talk about this rotation from precious metals over to oil. I want to ask, so you're looking at oil longterm and I think people are curious about where the sector is going to go. We've had the the Venezuela situation unfolding. Is there is there a bare case for oil that you can see or does it all look pretty positive? >> No, there's there's two bare cases. One I hope occurs actually, which is to say peace. Uh, I would love to see Iranian society resolve their internal complaint, you know, conflicts without too many people dying. I'd love to see that. Uh, it would take Iran five or six years to reinvest enough sustaining capital to restore their oil business. I would live to see peace break out between Russia and the Ukraine which would after five or six years allow for the resumption of large quantity oil exports from Russia. I would love to see a resolution of whatever disputes are holding back Venezuela. Um, in my lifetime, uh, the hope for peace and an end to political disputes has been often a fleeting hope. >> Yeah. >> Uh, but I I would love to see it. I'd love to be wrong in my oil thesis as a consequence of humankind being healthier. That would be great. >> Yeah. Um, the other thing that scares me is it's been a very long time, Charlotte, since we had a good thorough recession, never mind depression. And if we had a synchronized global recession, particularly one that was accompanied by a crisis in confidence, aka a 2008 style event, something that really shook people. You can have loyal lower supplies, which we will have in oil, absent peace. if demand falls and you still don't go to price rise. So those are the two bare cases that I can see uh a synchronized global recession or depression a bad thing by any estimation or peace a good thing by any estimation. >> Yeah, two two very different cases there. And maybe I'll I'll follow you down that recession path a little bit further because it's something I've been talking about I feel for years at these events. When are we going to have that recession come? and it seems to be it's just been staved off and staved off. Do you anticipate that coming to a head? How how are you seeing it? >> I'm surprised we haven't seen it so far and I think I understand what's happening. I think uh I think that we've been through 40 years of very benign economic climate and I think that people are preconditioned yeah >> to be confident. People's actions in the future are often determined by their experience in the immediate past and most people's experience in the last 40 years been pretty good. You know uh the second thing is that I think that people like me underestimate the impact of technology on the economy and the ability through techn technology to generate more GDP growth with less capital expenditure. I would have expected 10 years ago that the level of government expenditure in Canada in the United States that we would have seen would have done a more thorough job of driving private capital out of the market. But one consequence of technology is that the private side of our economy, not the government side, the private side of our economy has been able as a consequence of technology to do a lot more with less. We'll continue to see that that will become increasingly political unpop politically unpopular. Let's say that you are a low-sklls worker, but you can get by living five to a house with a job at McDonald's, paying $20 an hour. McDonald's is highly likely to automate your job away. Uh McDonald's in the future, rather than having 40 $20 an hour workers, is going to have four $60 an hour workers who are machinery technicians. From the economy's point of view, this is very good thing. From the point of view of somebody who eats at McDonald's, this is a very good thing because it'll moderate their price increases. From the point of view of the 36 employees that get laid off, this is a very bad thing. >> I can Yeah, I can definitely see what you're saying there. And I wonder if we go back to looking at the commodities, how you're approaching this. If you were looking at your portfolio, how how do you think it breaks down in terms of percentage by commodity? At this point, >> I don't know. Um, I'm probably overweight precious metals still because I was so overweighted. Uh, uh, I'm overweight copper because I've been overweight copper my whole life. I'm a little underweight iron because I had expected the economy to be worse and iron to sell off. It didn't happen. Um, I'm way underweight oil and gas from where I would like to be. I mean that's where the additions will be taking place. What's really changed in my economy is the composition not by commodity but rather by market cap. uh in this market for whatever reason as we discussed earlier the valuation disparities in the juniors price to value uh have been unattractive relative to the majors and so very unlike the portfolio I would have assembled when I was your age which was a different market. My portfolio now is more betacentric. Uh I'm less willing to take the single company risk because the valuation incentives to do so don't strike me as being particularly evident. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes sense and it goes back to that individualized approach once again. And one one question I'm trying to ask people at this event is okay, we know that gold and silver are having their their time to shine right now. What is the the next bull market that you see coming? Would it be oil and gas? >> No, I think oil and gas is two years out, two and a half years out. It's just such a certain event that I'm willing to take the time risk. You may recall in earlier interviews I talked about the difference between inevitable something that had to happen and imminent which means it has to happen soon. I don't know the time side. I just know it has to happen. If I looked at across the commodity spectrum at risktore reward uh I would probably urge people to look at copper. The copper price has done pretty well but it should have done much better this year. It should have done much better because we have a structural supply deficit and Cobra Panama came out of production, Cula came out of production, Grass Per came out of production and Kodelco had production halts at three mines. We had 7% of world supply come out of production in a market that was already under supplied. In a normal market, uh, a market that wasn't perhaps recession tampered, one would have expected a 20 or 25% price increase as a consequence of that production decline, which we didn't see. So, I think copper has a bit of a coiled spring aspect to it, too. Some of the tension certainly in the last four weeks has been unwound. Copper's done fairly well, but for most of the year, copper seemed really strangely uh muted in terms of price increase. And make no mistake, a supply shortfall absolutely inevitable in copper. >> Right. Okay. And so the supply shortfall for copper is at this point it's outweighing that economic recession type of concern. >> Yep. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong forever. I'm wrong till the end of the recession and I've been wrong that time many times in my career but you know I was uh I was in London at mining week and uh I heard a really interesting paper I think it was by Wood McKenzie where they pulled the biggest copper mining companies in the world and they said that the copper industry needs to spend $250 billion in the next 10 years to maintain current production. current production's in deficit. The problem is that demand is growing at almost 2% compounded. So, we're going to spend $250 billion dollars, 150 of which we don't have, to maintain production uh at a level that isn't quite sufficient to meet current demand while demand increases. They could be wrong by a fair bit and still have a positive outlook. I also I want to bring you a another viewer question. This one is on platinum and we've talked about platinum palladium in past years and you were interested. You were doing research on what was going on there. Are they still of interest to you right now? >> Much less interest. I couldn't find uh I I couldn't find any platinum seniors to buy. Uh despite the fact that Sabani is run by a good friend of mine, uh the political risk seemed extreme. I did buy a couple platinum juniors and I bought some Sprat physical platinum and palladium trust because I couldn't find another way to express my preference. The platinum price now is up by what 80%. Uh I'm probably going to sell that fairly soon for the same reason I sold my silver. I bought it because platinum was priced at less than the cost of production and I thought it had to go up by 50%. And instead it went up by 80%. So for me, if the reason to own something goes away, the position has to go away. >> Yeah. Yeah. That recurring theme again. And I want to I'll throw in one on uranium as well. And this one is more for me because I get to moderate a panel tomorrow on the outlook for small cap uranium companies. So that'll be interesting. But I was thinking back to when we talked in November and you had mentioned, you know, if people want exposure to uranium, they can just buy Camo. So is there a case for you at this point or in the future for the small cap uranium stocks? Again, >> depends on how hard somebody wants to work. uh the structural market outlook, which is to say the movement of the market for physical uranium from a spot market where prices are indeterminate to a term market is hugely beneficial for the juniors. There's no other mineral resource commodity in the world where a junior can lock in price and terms for the commodity over 10 years. And that means that they can get bank financing which they couldn't have gotten five years ago. The difficulty with that thesis is that of out of 120 uranium juniors worldwide, there's probably only six or seven that have enough uranium to bother with. So you have to be very careful about the rapper that you express your preference for the juniors in you. If you come into a junior and they spend their whole presentation talking to you about the uranium market, time to leave. You need to ask them where they sit uh in the production cost, you know, profile. Are they in the best cile worldwide? Where they sit in return on capital employed? In other words, are they going to get built against their competitors? Um, you know, it's it's important to ask these questions. It's important to ask them. A lot of them are going to say, "We have great leverage to uranium because we don't have a contract signed." What that means is they can't finance. If you don't have a contract signed and the banker doesn't know that he or she's going to get paid back, they won't lend the money. So, what they're holding out to you to be a virtue is in fact a vice. It's important that you know that. It's important when you interview juniors that you determine whether or not they have any economic deposits of uranium. If the price of something that you don't have any of goes up, it should not impact your value that much. It might impact your price, but not your value. >> Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. Can be very tricky. All right, we we need to start wrapping up so I can get you back out onto the show floor, but is is it too early to ask you about the rule symposium coming up in July? >> It's absolutely not. I know you're at a at a competing symposium, so you can't you can't praise my symposium too eloquently, but I think we have all things considered the finest natural resource conference on the planet. Uh we did a great job last year. We made our attendees a lot of money. The consequence of that is that applications for admission to this year's show are running triple what they were last year's level. If you want to come uh make your decision fairly quickly. M Why might you come? Well, I think we do a very good job with big picture macro among other things. telling uh our viewers the way the world really is, not the way that CNBC or Fox would like you to believe it is. Uh every exhibitor, our show is vetted. The qualifications to be an exhibitor at most conferences is a check that cashed and at our conference you have to be owned in my portfolio. Doesn't guarantee that your stock goes up, but it does guarantee that I vetted you. We have a wonderful feature called the living legends where we interview on stage people who have built several multi-billion dollar companies to learn how they did it and to learn how their in how their life experience can make them a better investor and more importantly you a better investor. This year we're adding a new feature for folks your age something called the next legends. rather than just pulling on stage Robert Frerieden and Bob Quartermain and Robert you know Bob uh you know Bob Dickinson, Rick Rule, all these old dinosaurs. Uh we're bringing on some of the people in their 40s and 50s who've had enough success that you know they're going to be successful in the future but have the legs to be worth investing in for the next 20 years. Nobody's done this before. Uh finally uh at our conference whether you attend live or live stream you have access to the conference recordings for a year because we give you 46 hours of programming in 4 days which is more than you can absorb to get your money's worth. You you need to play the tapes. I put on the conference I have to play the tapes. And if after all that you think for any reason that you didn't get you your money's worth I'll give you your money back. This is the only money back guarantee in the conference business, which is important. We've only had a refund about onetenth of 1% of the money we charged. Last year, we had 1,400 online attendees. We had three refund requests, which will tell you that we did a pretty good job. But that that guarantee is your guarantee that we're highly confident in our programming. >> Well, certainly something to look forward to. We'll have the link in the video description for people to check out if they would like to. And I'll let you go unless you had any final thoughts for investors. >> Only if you might want to go uh get in the hotel room block with uh reservations running 3 to one ahead of last year. Our room block uh which saves you a lot of money on the hotel will run out this year. We will sell out of hotel rooms. >> Okay. Well, good reminder for for me as well. So, thank you and thank you. Thank you very much for coming on to talk about what's going on. Always appreciated. >> Pleasure. Thank you for a decade of great interviews. >> Of course. Thank you. Once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investing.com and this is Rick Rule.