Live Q&A with Rick Rule and Albert Lu

Rule Investment Media Aug 27, 2026

Summary

Oil setup toward 2029 reflects deferred sustaining capex of $1B per day, with Venezuela reopening adding limited supply.

Value prospect generators by multiplying third-party drill spend by the carried interest, then subtracting G&A — the synthetic profit measure.

Anchor mining NPV discount rates to the host sovereign rate plus a 3-4% risk premium; US, Canada, and Australia use the project WACC instead.

Press winners by trimming as price approaches value — Rick cut Paladin at $1.25, $3, and $6, pausing whenever a smart new buyer emerged.

Northern exploration stocks typically get crushed each winter without news; March or April entries exploit the seasonal weak-handed selling.

Rick rates B2Gold a 4, saying the only reason it is not a 3 is the management transition from retiring CEO Clive Johnson, whom he does not yet know as well as his successor
Rick expects B2Gold stock to roughly double once it works through the cost overruns and delays at its Northern Canada project, drawing the analogy to Equinox eventual recovery after a similar stumble
Rick says Johnson handled the Mali political turmoil by flying to Bamako personally and quietly negotiating a deal rather than criticizing the government in print, and got penalized for other operators problems
Rick flags the open question on the intermediate-term development pipeline, naming Gramalote in Colombia, and says a Clive-led team would have muscled it through in a way the market would have hated and he would have liked

Rick says Keith Neumeyer is spending 30 million on a drilling campaign aimed at answering whether Jerritt Canyon has enough non-refractory and refractory ore left to justify a H2 2027 restart
Rick notes the last four operators tried to milk Jerritt Canyon for cash, leaving the asset very unloved and starved for capital
Rick advice is to wait for the drill results and the implied resource and NPV rather than anticipate a restart
Rick framing: the best place to look for gold is in the shadow of a head frame

Rick calls the Mark Clark and Morgan Hart team at Regis absolutely top quality
Rick highlights that they acquired projects overlooked by others, brought them in on time and on budget, and used free cashflow to rinse, wash, and repeat
Rick notes the same team is now repeating the playbook at Emerald Resources, which he flags as a serially successful name for early Rule Classroom attendees

Rick corrects himself at the end of the Q&A: the Vizsla deposit was originally explored as a porphyry but the mineralization style is clearly VMS

Rick admits he does not know enough about Prospector to give a specific answer and instead uses Steve helicopter-tour anecdotes as a vehicle for a general rule
Rick general rule: when a Northern explorer has run up hard on unreleased assays and faces a winter news gap, he prefers to wait for the released news and often finds reality cheaper than the rumor-stretched price

Top takeaway Rick credits Clive Johnson with personally flying to Bamako and quietly negotiating with the Malian government during the political turmoil, instead of criticizing them in public
Rick says Johnson got penalized in the market because of problems other operators had in Mali, which Rick calls interesting
Rick says Johnson spent a billion dollars on a Northern Canada project that came in well over time and budget, and expects B2Gold stock to recover roughly the way Equinox did
Rick suspects Clive would have muscled through the Gramalote development program in Colombia in a way the market would have hated and he would have loved

Top takeaway Rob McEwen suggested Elaine Ellingham might be a future living legend, citing her company Oh My Minds in Guyana
Rick notes familiarity with the Guyana Shield and fondness for the region but admits he does not know enough about Ellingham company today to comment as an investor

Top takeaway Rick argues that the oil and gas industry has under-invested roughly a billion dollars a day in sustaining capital, and expects that to translate into higher oil prices around 2029
Rick walks through his prospect-generator model: third-party gross expenditures times the carried interest is synthetic revenue, minus G&A and prospect-generation costs, giving synthetic profit that he benchmarks against market cap and capital employed
Rick details his NPV discount-rate framework: an industry-consensus market rate (gold 5%, copper 8%, oil and gas 10%) plus a separate risk-adjusted real rate built off each country sovereign dollar borrowing cost plus a premium, with no risk adjustment in low-risk jurisdictions like the US, Canada, Australia, and Chile
Rick argues benchmarking to the S&P 500 is generally meaningless for resource investors because of style variability, and that comparing results over one year distorts the picture while comparing over fifty years is beyond the average investor horizon
Rick flags the six-pack macro indicators (S&P, dollar, 10-year yield, gold, copper, and oil), crediting Tony Greer

Top takeaway Steve introduces the Q&A and asks most of the questions as the on-camera host
Steve reports back from a recent helicopter tour of Prospector Metals, noting geologists who held 12-cent options through a dollar share price and looked visibly excited about the assays

Top takeaway Eric Sprott is cited as the proponent of pressing your winners, which prompts Rick long walk-through of how he sized and trimmed the Paladin position from 10 cents through 10 dollars

Top takeaway Jason Jessup is quoted as saying he strongly believes Magna Mining will be a 5 billion market cap company before 2030
Rick highlights Jessup prior success at FNX as the reason the call has weight, noting the team has been implementing in the Sudbury Basin for three decades