I Asked The Greatest Junior Mining Investors What They Are Buying Right Now | Rule Symposium

Palisades Gold Radio Jul 16, 2026

Summary

Gold and silver fell 30-50% from highs, and multiple guests frame the pullback as a buying window for quality developers, not a trend break.

AISC (All-In Sustaining Cost — what it really costs to produce an ounce) explains the margin math: $4,000 gold against a $2,000 AISC.

One guest argues gold pays no dividend, so valuation must run against debt, money supply and GDP instead of cash flow.

Royalty companies and prospect generators are presented as the safer way to play gold and silver than owning operators outright.

Several guests expect a wave of mining M&A, because producers shed high-cost operations and hold cash without a growth pipeline.

Key points on Agnico Eagle Mines

Roosen places Agnico in the tier-one producer group that already had its run up, and says his attention has now moved down the curve to the developer space.
Costa likewise groups Agnico with the large producers he describes as solid operators running multiple assets, and says he does not think investors miss much by owning the majors here.

Key points on First Majestic Silver

Prins says First Majestic in Mexico has been quite depressed and that its price has come down with silver.
She still sees value in it because it is a pure-play silver mine, while flagging jurisdictional issues as something investors have to weigh.

Key points on Newmont

Named by Roosen alongside Agnico as one of the tier-one producers whose run up has already happened, ahead of his expectation that value now sits in the developer space.
Costa cites Newmont as one of the big multi-asset operators he considers a low-regret holding at these levels rather than a source of opportunity.

Key points on Aya Gold & Silver

Prins names Aya Gold and Silver as a pure-play silver miner and part of where she sees value, defining pure play as a miner very close to the silver itself that does not have to process other metals in its deposit.
Her case for the group rests on silver having been the most severely and most quickly depressed precious metal, hit by a very high volume of paper trading.

Key points on Contango Ore Inc

Khunkhun uses his own company as the example of how violently small resource shares can move, going from a March low of about $16 a share to an April high of $29 in one month.
He says the shares are back at about $20, which he presents as a good opportunity for investors given how low valuations are across the sector.

Key points on Dakota Gold

The company is developing a new mine at Richmond Hill in South Dakota, where it has developed a large resource and is currently running a pre-feasibility study.
The asset sits in the Homestake district, which has a long mining history, and the Homestake mine itself produced about 40 million ounces; the company also holds the Maitland project along strike.
Richmond Hill is described as lower-grade open pit heap leach potential, comparable to the nearby Wharf mine about two miles away.
The company was able to finance off the recent increase in the gold price and was sitting on over $106 million of working capital at its last quarterly results.
That balance sheet is intended to carry the project through pre-feasibility, feasibility and permitting over the next few years.

Key points on Empress Royalty Corp

Phillips says he is a shareholder and is standing at the company's booth on the conference floor, describing Empress as a great royalty company that is executing.
He pairs that with his view that royalty companies and prospect generators are probably the safer way to play gold and silver at this point in the cycle.

Sean Roosen's takeaways

Top takeaway Roosen says hard assets are where people should be looking, calling gold mines and copper deposits the lead horses in the sector and the safest of the critical minerals for the conservative side of a balance sheet.
He argues the case in purchasing-power terms: an ounce of gold buys a fine men's suit today and, on his reasoning, a comparable suit ten years from now, while that same suit priced in dollars would be around $15,000.
He points to a large economic bubble with trillions of dollars of trapped value and a volatile geopolitical picture, especially energy affecting China, as reasons to stay with hard assets.
On the dollar he says de-dollarization of the hydrocarbon trade between the Middle East and China and Russia is well underway, that Western democracies carry unprecedented debt, and that gold is the only currency not backed by government debt, leaving gold what he sees as another couple of legs.
On where the value gap sits in equities, he says royalty companies have already been the first movers, followed by tier-one producers, and that his own focus is fully permitted, fully financed developers in safe jurisdictions, with the real gap furthest out on the development curve and the second gap in names within 12 to 24 months of a permit.

Robert McEwen's takeaways

Top takeaway McEwen says the junior and developer space is attractively priced, with commodity prices trading at about a 55-year low relative to financial assets.
He sees a rotation under way from technology into hard assets, and says senior gold producers and other mining companies have swelled with cash after shedding high-cost operations and cutting back exploration spending.
The gap he identifies is a missing growth pipeline: they have the money but nothing to spend it on, which is why he expects to see a lot more M&A over the next year in this space.
He tells viewers it is time to start adding some of these juniors to their portfolios.
Asked how to capitalise on development stories, he says that is the risk he likes to take and where he has found the highest return, calling those names the Ferraris of this space.

Adrian Day's takeaways

Top takeaway Day says gold cannot be valued the way an ordinary asset is, because you value a normal asset on the cash it generates and gold famously pays no dividend, so it has to be judged relative to something else.
On that relative basis he finds gold undervalued against its previous peaks, measured against inflation-adjusted world debt, the money supply and GDP, with debt having grown far faster than GDP.
His worked example: for the dollar alone to be fully gold-backed you would be looking at a $21,000 gold price, and with 25% backing the implied price is far higher again.
He argues the overriding issues of debt and deficits demand significant long-term currency depreciation, so metals and mining benefit in the long run.

Willem Middelkoop's takeaways

Top takeaway Middelkoop frames his call on the bigger picture rather than daily price action: the commodity market bottomed in early 2016, when he was buying out his partners, retested in March 2020, and made a triple bottom in the first half of 2024.
He thinks the sector is now in a new bull market that is roughly six months into a healthy technical correction.
He expects gold and silver to find a bottom somewhere in the next few weeks to few months, followed by the start of the next leg up.
From an Elliott Wave and technical standpoint he expects that next leg to be even stronger and longer than the last one, which he says should give the junior gold and silver miners considerable additional upside.

Rick Rule's takeaways

Top takeaway Rule refuses to name a commodity or a stock, saying the real opportunity is to invest in yourself first, in the knowledge, the process and the relationships, before allocating to anything on the exhibitor floor.
His operating rule is to buy hate: the extractive business is capital-intensive and cyclical, so you are either a contrarian or you become a victim, and he points out that nobody wants to buy uranium at $8 a pound while everybody wants it at $80.
He notes there is nothing on offer by way of hate right now, because the easy money in this market has been made and the sure money is still ahead.
On gold he calls it stupidly under-owned and says a lower price is good for a buyer; he began saving in gold in 2000 at $256 an ounce, and argues that against a U.S. 10-year Treasury yielding 4.6 in a currency depreciating at 8 to 10 percent compounded, gold has compounded about 8% nominally over the last 26 years and held its purchasing power.
He frames this as wealth preservation and insurance against dying paper money on a 10, 20, 30-year view rather than the next quarter, and argues that more money has to be created to cover the shortfall in demand for sovereign bonds, so ultimately you have to debase the currency.

Shawn Khunkhun's takeaways

Top takeaway Khunkhun says what he likes right now is valuations: with gold at $4,000 an ounce and an industry all-in sustaining cost of about $2,000, even a modest 50,000 ounce producer is generating around $100 million of free cash flow.
He notes companies are around 50% below their January highs, valuations are low and there is not a lot of investor interest, which he reads as giving investors time to learn about companies properly.
He adds that some of the juniors are down about 50% against gold's roughly 30% decline, and expects that should also work on the upside.
He uses his own company as the example, saying Contango went from a March low of about $16 a share to an April high of $29 in one month and is now back at about $20, which he presents as a good opportunity.

Tavi Costa's takeaways

Top takeaway Costa says there are plenty of ways of finding quality right now, including well outside metals, and from a macro lens argues agricultural commodities are behaving the way oil did eight or nine months ago, sideways for two to three years, so he suspects a breakout is close.
He reads gold explorers outperforming the seniors as evidence that sticky institutional money has come in and is not selling, while retail tends to sell at panic and he believes we are at panic now.
He also notes this is a rare situation in which the big names are steeply oversold and very liquid, which he considers a good way to play this window.
On positioning he says valuations across resource equities are at very low levels, much closer to all-time lows and averages, with money still pouring out of the GDX and the GDXJ while physical gold is seeing redemptions.
The sentiment backdrop he cites is a bull-bear index on gold that has been around 7.5% bullish for the last few weeks and actually printed zero bullish two weeks ago, against the roughly 40% one-way reading that would normally count as a good contrarian signal.

Brien Lundin's takeaways

Top takeaway Lundin hosts the floor round, walking the conference and asking veterans where the opportunity sits, and he is the voice that presses them on setup, share structure and whether a name is a takeover target.
Closing the show he says he generally likes metals and mining and calls it a target-rich environment where every metal has a compelling bullish story, with the exploration and development companies cashed up and progressing and the producers making money, which he puts among the best environments he has seen in his career in the sector.
He quotes Doug Casey's image of a bull market trying to siphon Hoover Dam through a garden hose, noting that once the move reaches the most tertiary assets, of which junior explorers are the most tertiary of all, the price response becomes extreme and getting paid on it is a once-a-decade event.

Nomi Prins's takeaways

Top takeaway Prins attributes the depressed state of the sector to exaggerated paper selling relative to volatile oil prices, to inflation figures that grab the headlines, and to the perception that high inflation will persist and so the Fed will raise rates, arguing all of that has preceded what is actually happening under the ground.
She makes silver the biggest opportunity in that group because it has been the most depressed, and the most quickly, by a confluence of very high paper volume: ETFs and futures, hedge funds moving silver with the headlines using AI algorithmic methods, and then program trading coming in and recreating those headlines as the price falls.
She sees a lot of value in pure-play silver miners, which she defines as miners very close to the silver itself that do not have to process other metals in their deposits.
On copper she is also positive, noting it has not been paper traded as much because it is treated as a base metal and so should be hit by inflation headlines, yet it has stayed steady, reached highs in May and sits only a little below them, with tremendous opportunity in copper and junior copper developers as the world heads into a massive copper scarcity.
On uranium she notes prices have held around 85, a high new platform level, with utilities buying at $95 to $100, and that Western Hemisphere uranium miners have significantly underperformed that price, making it one of the few areas where they have.

Brent Cook's takeaways

Top takeaway Cook says quality projects run by quality people are getting to reasonable prices again, and that the job is to do the due diligence on the exhibitors: find a high-margin deposit or a discovery with that potential, big enough that the company does not have to build it, because someone is going to buy it.
He says the opportunity is across the board rather than one category, covering developers drilling out a resource and grassroots exploration in a good area, but it always comes down to quality.
He owns a junior royalty company in the western US and uses it as the worked example of the prospect generator model: geologists find a property, do not take it far, bring in a partner, usually a junior, and retain a royalty that eventually comes through.
He notes you cannot easily outcompete a larger quality company, which is the point of attaching a royalty to that model.

Jeff Phillips's takeaways

Top takeaway Phillips calls the current move a healthy pullback: things got frothy at PDAC, people are scared, and that creates the chance to buy companies in much better shape than they were a year ago, especially in junior development and exploration.
He does not treat that as the end of the trend, thinking we are in a bull market that will last years but with big speed bumps along the way.
On targets he says takeover candidates are attractive and he believes a few of the companies on the floor will not be around next year, while cautioning that the junior resource market is probably not for someone who does not understand it.
His screen is people and share structure: companies whose share price is down, that have cashed up and are not going to need to raise, with large insider holdings and no brokers sitting on the price because they know they will have to come back to market, so an investor can buy the insiders' own sale from three months ago.

Matthew Piepenberg's takeaways

Top takeaway Piepenberg says this is the best of times for gold, and that it was not when gold peaked in January and then gold and silver were shattered, which he calls a great buying opportunity for central banks, sovereign wealth funds and ordinary people alike.
He says what is different about 2026 as opposed to the '70s is that the world is far more fragile, currencies far weaker and desperation levels far higher, so the opportunity now is to buy gold and silver on a fire sale, and he thinks that was deliberate because central bank buying is off the books.
He notes over the last 10 of the last 11 quarters there were more than 200 tons bought per quarter, that China and the central banks are all playing the long game, and that regular investors could be just as farsighted.
He is explicit that he is not a trader and looks at gold as wealth preservation and insurance against dying paper money, thinking 10, 20, 30 years out rather than at the next quarter or the next price action.
He says the retracements of the first two quarters were simply more opportunities for sophisticated metal buyers to add, and that the objective point is that melting paper currency buys less and less, which only worsens as sovereign bonds become less trusted and money has to be created to cover the shortfall in demand for them.

Robert Quartermain's takeaways

Top takeaway Quartermain's central call is that the secular bull market in gold is intact and that the pullback is fairly restrictive from a time perspective, pointing to starting his last mine in 2010 when gold was around $1,200 and central banks were not yet buying, and saying most of his own investment is in gold.
He says many companies were able to get out and finance off the recent increase in the gold price and that he expects to find plenty of other opportunities of that kind.
He believes being in gold is good in this environment and that being in a good jurisdiction where mining already occurs is also a good opportunity for shareholders.
On copper he is positive because the world is electrifying and growth in Asia is still going, but he expects a long wait for new supply, since copper mines are expensive to explore for and to build and water, community acceptance and regulation keep slowing them down.
On price he would be quite happy if copper stays where it is, because the project he is developing sits in the second lowest quartile of the cost curve, while a higher price would be needed to bring enough other production on stream.